Profligacies embody shameless extravagances. Birds symbolize freedom and liberation, among other things. What have they to do with each other? One girl is the connection between these two: Tris Prior. Right off the bat, Tris gets a a tattoo once she enters into Dauntless initiation: three small, flying birds. She describes them as being a reminder of each of her family members. However, these birds mean something else, as well: a flight to self discovery. Tris realizes, as she fights through the brutal initiation, that she is not at all as "Abnegation," or selfless, as she originally made herself out to be. She engages in, so to speak, shameless extravagances, such as jumping off skyscrapers on more than one occasion, getting herself killed on more than one occasion, etc. Becoming more concerned with aiding herself find out who she is meant to be, she realizes that to be concerned with oneself isn't selfish (and even if it is selfish, it doesn't necessarily equate to "bad"). With this realization, she starts her flight. Foster, in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, orates that a disrupted flight could mean a bad omen. Tris's flight is disrupted only slightly by revolution, near-death experiences, and troublesome relationships. Never does she crash-land, but she is deterred from her path as all humans are deterred from their own paths. These deterrences foreshadow her death, but by the time her death comes, she is prepared to greet death like an old friend. And at the door of death, she sees her passed mother arise to take her away from life, and return home: returning home, yet again, is another connotation of flight and birds.
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AuthorNishat Firoj is a young dashing girl who is wanderlust in the literary world! Archives |