Having been sick and confined to my bed by my mother, I decided to use my time missing school to read a book that I'd recently purchased and had been looking for an excuse to read. It's title is Allegiant by Veronica Roth, and it's the third (and last) in the Divergent series. In the first book, you're introduced to a world set in Chicago, although it's not like it is now. The city is divided up into 5 factions, and each faction focuses on pursuing a certain trait such as intelligence or peace. When you're 16, you choose to either stay in the faction you grew up in, or join a different faction where you'll spend the rest of your life away from your family. The main character, of course, chooses to leave the Abnegation (selflessness) faction for the Dauntless (courage) faction. She also discovers that she is a special kind of person called Divergent, meaning she has the aptitude to be in multiple factions. This type of person isn't desired in the city because they go against the norm and are hard to control. Thus, the leader of the Erudite (intelligence) faction has made it her mission to find and kill all the Divergent people.
In the second book, there's a revolution and the faction system is overthrown by a huge group of factionless (basically homeless) rebels. The main character, Tris, is involved in it because it's led by her boyfriend's mom. At the end of the book, she discovers secret video footage hidden by the leader of the Erudite before she died, and goes against the rebellion to expose the footage to the city. It's from the people who set up the factions, and it says that the outside world sucks and the Divergent need to be sent out to help those outside the city when there's a large enough number of them. Bottom line: Divergent turn out to be good.
Now starting to get to the point of all this; a lot of things in the third book reminded me of The Stranger. A quick plot summary is that a group of people from Chicago rebelling against the factionless takeover go outside the city to see if the Divergent are really needed. They find out that no, the video was basically a scam and Chicago was set up as a genetic experiment and the Divergent are just people who's genes are whole. Well, starting to tie into The Stranger, one of the members of the expedition to the outside world named Peter reminded me somewhat of Mersault. Throughout the series, Peter has continually made bad choices and gotten on everyone's bad side (this isn't like Mersault, but I'm leading up to it). In the first book during Dauntless initiations, he stabbed Tris's friend in the eye, and then proceeded to try and throw Tris into a chasm of death. All the choices he makes are for his own benefit, and to get himself ahead. Towards the end of the third book, Peter is pretty unhappy with himself, but doesn't feel like he can change.
What reminds me of Mersault is that once in the outside world, Peter is trying to grasp the concept of his own insignificance to help him deal with his self-hatred. He takes a map of Illinois and circles all the places he's been in the world (basically just the Chicago area). Then he takes a map of the US and circles where he's been, and takes a map of the whole world and circles where he's been. He comes to the realization that all his bad choices don't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, that they don't really matter. I think it helps him come to terms with himself, and be able to live with himself knowing that the things he did didn't really make a difference. Similarly, in The Stranger, when Mersault is faced with his own death, realizing that his life, or life in general, doesn't matter helps him to accept the fact that he's going to die, and help him to come to terms with it instead of dreading it.
Although Allegiant and The Stranger are two very different books, they both contained a common theme of existentialism and I thought it was really interesting how a modern dystopian fiction novel could remind me so much of a novel written in the 1940's about a man unintentionally getting involved in a murder that makes him rethink life.
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