Only the Good Guys Die Young: Why I Loved Allegiant

(WARNING: Spoilers for Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, the original Star Trek and Star Trek: the Next Generation movies, and various Sherlock Holmes stories and adaptations.)

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I finally got the chance to read Allegiant, the finale to Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy. I knew going into it that there’d been significant fan backlash against the ending, though I didn’t know why. Uncharitably to the fans, I assumed that the most likely explanation was Tobias and Tris didn’t end up together — I liked Roth’s portrayal of the realities of being a brave young woman and thought that perhaps she’d pull off showing that a first love isn’t necessarily always the best love.

Well, I was right and I was wrong. Tobias and Tris don’t end up together, but not because their love isn’t lasting. It is.

Instead, Roth pulls off an amazing climax in which our heroine, Tris, the barely teenaged protagonist we’ve come to love over the past three books, dies.

So what? you might think. Harry Potter dies. Spock dies. Sherlock Holmes dies. Big whoop.

Yes, but unlike Harry, Spock, and Sherlock, Tris stays dead. She’s gone.

I love how Roth’s construction of the story lets us see the big hole she’s left behind. I love how it helps us feel the tragedy of her death — all the things she’ll never get to see or do, all the wasted potential of a young person dying. Although we get the sense Tris is going somewhere full of love when she dies, it’s not the happy yay-Narnia ending it is for the Pevensies.

I wrote about a year ago that I was sick of heroes sacrificing themselves, but Allegiant pushes me to amend that. So often, death in fiction is reduced to just another one-time gesture.

When the characters I mentioned above die, there’s an unspoken understanding that their story continues. Even Sherlock Holmes, whose author intended him to stay dead, lives on just as vibrantly in new stories until “The Empty House” brings him back for good.Harry’s death doesn’t change the world of the story, even before he chooses to come back, because we see it from his perspective and understand that he lives on. It’s more like following him as he decides whether to run away to Australia or stay at Hogwarts. Heck, Star Trek: the Next Generation‘s Data is “really” dead for all of two seconds before we learn that he’s uploaded his positronic neural net into an identical prototype android called B4.

Yes, death and resurrection are an important storytelling trope in cultures all over the world. Mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested that most heroes die and are reborn, literally or metaphorically, as part of their journeys. Though I wouldn’t rely blindly on Campbell, in this case, I agree with him: many protagonists symbolically “die” in their stories. They plunge into despair when their situations seems hopeless. They end up trapped in the enemy’s dungeons, all but defeated. They actually literally bite it for a chapter or two.

That’s why it feels so refreshing for the death of the protagonist to feel like an actual loss.

Tris’s death in Allegiant feels the same way as Leslie’s death in Bridge to Terabithia. It’s unexpected. It’s emotionally senseless, even though the events leading up to the death make logical sense. And of course it was avoidable, if anyone had known it was there to be avoided. So many silly little things contributed to it, so many seemingly trivial decisions, that you want to rewind time and tweak what happens, just a little. Fix that rope. Don’t go down to the river by yourself. Don’t be so hasty.

And there’s no way that either of those two characters could have really understood what she was giving up. In Bridge to Terabithia, Leslie’s just a kid. She can’t know the joys of being a teenager and an adult, and now she never will. Tris is less innocent: she’s both killed and seen friends die, but she still can’t know the whole long life she sacrifices when she acts impulsively to protect those she loves.

It’s those who are still alive who truly understand the depth of what was taken from their loved ones. Jesse and Tobias must go on living. They must see every moment Leslie and Tris are missing and mourn that loss anew. They must live with the hurt that comes every time they think of an album of happy memories to which they can never add, and they must figure out a way to deal with the guilt that comes first from irrational self-blame for failing to save someone else and then from growing and healing.

Bridge to Terabithia is about Jesse, so it’s no surprise that Leslie’s death is still told in terms of his story. She’s a supporting character, and he’s the protagonist.

But the Divergent trilogy has always been Tris’s story — so much so that at first, I found it jarring when alternate chapters were from Tobias’s point of view — and Roth pulls off keeping it that way even when she’s dead. We feel Tobias’s pain, and like a mourner, we feel for Tris as well as about Tris. We feel sad that she’s not here with her friends, doing what she would have loved to do. We feel sad that she no longer shares her life with Tobias, her love.

And I think that’s what really speaks to me about the end of Allegiant. Harry Potter, Spock, and Sherlock Holmes never stopped being the main characters. Neither did the Pevensies and their fellow honorary Narnians, regardless of the fact that their deaths were more permanent. Their narrators followed them post-mortem or stopped without them.

Tris’s sacrifice, on the other hand, wasn’t just her life. When she died, Allegiant stopped being about her and started being about the people she left behind.

Death means you can’t be the main character anymore. You’re still around, maybe, in the form of someone else’s inspiration or motivation or memories, but the best you can hope for is a supporting role.

You are giving up everything it means to be a protagonist.

And that’s why Tris’s death worked for me in a way that no other protagonist death has so far.