Well, nobody died. Is a book really dystopian if the protagonist survives the end? I suppose, but retrospectively Parable doesn't seem to match up with many other dystopian books. Sure, it featured the individual-verses-society narrative that we saw in both Brave New World and 1984, but in those two (and most other dystopian books I'm aware of), "society" is represented by a controlling, all-encompassing governmental system. In Parable, though, "society" is simply the hoards of people who are contributing to the chaos Lauren and her group had to deal with throughout the book. If BNW and 1984 are a warning about the dangers of totalitarianism, then Parable is a warning about the dangers of anarchy. For whatever reason, that seems like a really important distinction to me, one that makes this book feel less dystopian and more post-apocalyptic. I generally think of dystopias as places where the society (in the form of the government) tries to assert control over the individual, and that didn't really happen here. Maybe my perceptions about what makes a dystopia need revising.
Or maybe it's Lauren's ideology that makes this book dystopic and not apocalyptic. That's a common thread amongst all the dystopian "heroes" we've read about: Lauren, Winston, and John all harbored a feeling that something about the way society was going was wrong, and something had to be done about it. Lauren's religion gives her an ideological objection to society, and perhaps that strengthens the idea that the individual-vs-society narrative is what's important to a dystopian novel, regardless of the power structure of the society that's being resisted.
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