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Uglies

Page history last edited by Meagan Armstrong 13 years, 3 months ago

 

 

Plot Summary

     Uglies is an amazing book written by Scott Westerfeld about a teenage girl named Tally Youngblood. The book Uglies is set a few centuries in the future, after our civilization was wiped out by a bacteria. Tally lives in a dystopic future, where people live in an almost cast type system based on age. The age groups are given different names such as uglies, pretties, crumblies, and specials. Those age groups would be equivilent to children, teenagers, the elderly, and law enforcement. On their sixteenth birthday everyone goes through a surgery to become one of the “Pretties”. The pretties even get to live in their own town where everyone is beautiful and they have no responsibilies and only have fun. Tally can't wait turn pretty so that she can be reunited with her friend Peris in the New Pretty Town. Then she becomes friends with Shay, a girl who doesn't want to be pretty. They have fun pulling pranks and learning how to hoverboard. Shay wants to live outside the city, where a group of rebels called Smokies live. She shows Tally the rustie ruins and attempts to show her David, her friend who supposidly lives in the smoke. Tally seems to doubt the existance of David or the smoke at first but Shay ends up running away to find the Smoke, leaving Tally with directions written in a code that only she could understand, telling her how to get there.

 

     Special Circumstances, the pretties in control of the whole city, want to find the Smoke. When her friend dissapears they blackmail Tally, refusing to turn her pretty unless she finds the Smoke. Dr. Cable, the pretty in charge of Special Circumstances, gives Tally a pendant which, when activated, will tell them the location of the Smoke. Tally's choice is to find the Smoke and activate the pendant, betraying Shay, or stay ugly for life.

 

     Tally finds the Smoke, but comes to realize it's something worth preserving. She falls in love and finds out that being pretty means losing intelligence. She tries to destroy the pendant by throwing it into a fire, but accidentally sets it off. Special Circumstances comes and cruelly takes all the Smokies by force back to the cities they came from to make them pretty. Tally escapes from Special Circumstances and goes back to the city with the guy she loves, David, to rescue her friends. She rescues the Smokies from her city, but finds out that Shay has already become pretty. In the end, the reader is left wondering how Tally will fix the horrible mess that she created.

 

     Literature and the Child describes science fiction as a story that "explores scientific possibilities, asking and answering the question 'If this, then what?'" (Galda 208). Uglies is science fiction because it takes place in the future, when the story might be scientifically possible. It explores the idea "what would our society be like if all our petroleum exploded and killed off most of the population?" Almost everything in the story is given a scientific explanation. Hoverboards fly because they use magnets and can only fly when there's metal under them (Westerfeld 58). In the operation to make people pretty, doctors use knives to rub away the old skin so that only new perfect skin grows back (25). Everything in the story seems possible after scientific advancements, so the story is science fiction.

 

For the authors view on his book read the interview with Scott Westerfeld at the link below. 

 

http://scottwesterfeld.com/books/uglies.html

 

 

Textual Elements

     This book is told from the third person point of view. The reader sees the story from Tally’s position, though she is not directly telling it. The reader is aware of Tally’s thoughts, but not the thoughts of any of the other characters. The reader is able to relate to Tally and the Uglies, but has trouble understanding the Pretties. 

     This book is divided into three basic types of characters: Pretties, Uglies, and Special Circumstances. All of the Pretty characters are fun loving, but not very bright. Uglies seem to have more depth to them and the reader is able to understand their thought processes better than those of the Pretties. The reader is able to relate to the Uglies because if we lived in that society, we would be one of them. Special Circumstances are obviously intelligent, although the reader cannot relate to them very well, as they are the antagonists. They are cruel and manipulating, as a reader can tell from the way Tally describes them. “He [the man from Special Circumstances] was beautiful, without a doubt, but it was a terrible beauty…the man looked cold, commanding, intimidating, like some regal animal of prey” (Westerfeld 101).

     One element of the book that is especially interesting is that the reader is a character. The reader is part of a group called the Rusties, people from the past who have died out due to a catastrophe. Various parts of the book mention the Rusties and call the reader’s attention to the way a futuristic people may look at their actions. For example, when Tally’s at the Rusty Ruins she described factories as places where people “all worked together like bees in a hive instead of at home” (62). This causes readers to compare themselves to bees and question the sanity of factory work.

     One of the main themes of the book is nonconformity. Throughout the story, Tally breaks the rules, first by pulling tricks in the city and later by deciding to help the Smoke instead of Special Circumstances. Those who do conform (the Pretties) become mindless, never making any trouble (267). As David says “… there are no more controversies, no disagreements, no people demanding change. Just masses of smiling pretties, and a few people left to run things” (267). To conform is to lose your free will. The book indicates that nonconformity is a good thing.

 

Analysis and Critique

 

There are many elements of this book that contribute to making this book socially relevant. The book contains an entire subplot encouraging environmentalism and chastising the generations prior, a.k.a. the present, for their reckless use of oil and other natural resources. At many points during the book the author can be found displaying is negative views on those who do not preserve the environment. Another socially relevant issue that Uglies deals with is the issue of appearance. In the book the “uglies” are taught to dislike themselves because of their physical imperfections and thought less of as people because they are not pretty. The book makes the unhealthy body images that many of its readers idolize out to be grotesque and unnecessary. Further socially relevant topics that the book covers include, self-worth, individuality, and peer pressure. The book manages to address a great number of socially relevant issues into a book of only four hundred or so pages. 

 

      One problem that I had with Uglies is its reinforcement of the idea that politicians are ugly and comedians are fat. The part that mentions this was written to be humorous, but also sends a message to the reader. Shay is telling Tally about the people in magazines and says “They’re sports stars, actors, artists. The men with the stringy hair are musicians, I think. The really ugly ones are politicians, and someone told me the fatties are mostly comedians” (198). Though that statement came from Shay, a person from the future who does not completely know what today’s society was like, it still carries weight with the reader. It really annoys me that in a book where the author seemed to try so hard to stay gender neutral and not mention race that this other stereotype would be promoted. That part of the book would have been just as easy to comprehend without that statement and the author should not have included it.

 

     The author seems to really be pushing environmentalism in this book. He argues it through Tally’s aversion to cutting down trees (195). She almost seems unable to believe that anyone could be so cruel as to cut down trees (195). He also displays it in Tally’s negative attitude toward the Rusty Ruins. “You almost couldn’t believe people lived like this, burning trees to clear land, burning oil for heat and power, setting the atmosphere on fire with their weapons” (Westerfeld 62). Sentences like these are scattered throughout the book and make the reader question along with Tally the sanity of our weapons, burning oil, and cutting down so many trees. Later in the book, the narrator talks about clearing forests for grazing land, saying, “Whole rainforests had been consumed, reduced from millions of interlocking species to a bunch of cows eating grass, a vast web of life traded for cheap hamburgers” (233). Furthermore, the entire civilization refered to as “Rusties” were ruined by a dependence on oil. Their civilization failed when a virus was invented that turned oil into an extremely flammable substance that exploded on contact with oxygen. The idea here would seem to be that if we don’t stop using up all of the major resources on our planet that our future is doomed. 

     Another message the author sends the reader through Uglies is that skinniness is not pretty. On page 199 Tally is confronted with the picture of a model and is disturbed by how skinny she was.

The woman looked like she was starving, her ribs thrusting out from her sides, her legs so thin that Tally wondered how they didn’t snap under her weight… But there she was, smiling and proudly baring her body, as if she’d just had the operation and didn’t realize they’d sucked out way too much fat. (Westerfeld 199)

In the book, the operation is supposed to make people pretty based on features that all people naturally look for (16). The fact that the operation keeps more fat on pretties than on models today encourages the reader to look at skinniness and beauty as two completely separate things. It makes the reader question society’s standards of beauty and wonder why we think of models as beautiful in the first place. 

     Keeping with the same topic, Uglies shows the reader that a person's personality is more important than what is on the outside. When Tally falls in love with David, she realizes that she loves him even though his face is not perfect (250). She actually comes to see him as pretty because of the way that he is on the inside (250). This shows the reader that despite everything Tally says at the beginning of the book, it is not just how a person looks that makes others like them. It implies that there is something more important than being pretty on the outside. As David tells Tally "'What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful'" (279). This demonstrates to the reader that a person's personality can make them beautiful.

     One of the more hidden messages in the book is the importance of telling the truth. Tally’s main problem while she is in the Smoke is based on the fact that she is not being truthful with the Smokies. Her lies make one of the other characters, Croy have trouble trusting her (238). They intensify the arguments that Tally is having with Shay (241). They keep Tally from feeling like she completely belongs in the Smoke (244). When Special Circumstances finds the Smoke, Tally really regrets not having told the truth. “If she [Tally] had only told the truth about herself in the first place, the Smokies would have known what to do with the pendant” (321). Since so many problems are caused for Tally when she does not tell the truth, the reader learns the value of being truthful, that being truthful makes life easier.

One of the last hidden messages in the book is the message that the government is always watching and is in control. Throughout the book the government in Tally’s world is a force that should not be messed with. The law enforcement in the book, or “specials” as they are called in the book, are almost a myth. They are seen very rarely by common citizens and what they do is a mystery. They are known to have an almost cruel pretty look to them that sets them apart from the average citizen. In the story the citizens have no say in what goes on because the government or “specials” are in control of every aspect of their lives right down to the way that they look. 

 

The author has a blog that is easy to follow and quite interesting to check it out go to http://scottwesterfeld.com/blog/

 

 

Citation

 

Galda, Lee, Bernice Cullinan and Lawrence Sipe. Literature and the Child. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2006.

Westerfeld, Scott. Uglies. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005.

 

Westerfeld, Scott. Scott Westerfeld. Scott Westerfeld, n.d. Web. 12 Dec 2010. <http://scottwesterfeld.com/books/uglies.htm>.

 


 

 

 

 

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