Dystopia

« Bastien Gobet English Assessment #3 – Analytical Response Dystopian fiction texts often represent an imaginary world which distorts and exaggerates aspects of the writer’s world to make it worse as a warning.

The written text published in 2011 Delirium from Lauren Oliver, in which love is seen as a sickness and needs to be healed by a cure the government created to control the population.

The 1997’s film Gattaca , in which Andrew Niccol creates a society in which people’s genes are the most valuable thing and that someone’s genes mean everything and the recent film V for Vendetta from James McTeigue which came out in 2006 and highlights a country ruled by a dictator who has total control over the population.

In these three different dystopian pieces of work, dystopian genre conventions are used in different ways to invite readers to both agree challenge contemporary values, such as oppression, discrimination and freedom for example. In dystopian fictions, the resistant protagonists’ values are the ones readers are invited to endorse and the ones which will allow the resistant and alienated characters to achieve their aims.

In each of the three texts, the resistant protagonist has a dream or an aim pursued which challenge their society’s values and attitudes.

I was never more certain of how far away I was from my goal than when I was standing right beside it.

(Andrew Niccol) Jerome Vincent fought all his life to achieve his goal, going on a mission to Titan.

As this quote shows, it took a long way for him to achieve his aim because in the society he was living in, not being genetically modified or “Valid” restrained his opportunities of working in Gattaca and be what he wanted to.

The values that are pointed out with Jerome Vincent’s fight is determination, research of freedom and equality.

The value of determination is present along the other two texts as well.

I’d rather die on my own terms than live on theirs.

I’d rather die loving Alex than live without him.

(Lauren Oliver) The fact that Lena is ready to die if she can’t live how she wants to, loving Alex, which is in her society an illness which needs to be cure, shows a huge determination and resistance of the society and its rules.

This quotation has a powerful meaning.

Lauren Oliver compares. »