Delirium Is A Disease: Love In Lena Holloway's World

In Lauren Oliver’s novel, Delirium is a disease: Love. In Lena Holloway's world, anyone caught with the opposite sex is considered infected. Lena always believed them. Love kills you. Lena mentions it as though it's a sort of religious tome, saying, "defacing or destroying the Book of Shhh is sacrilege" (14.80) Safety, Health, Happiness. Lena Halloway, a fearless seventeen-year- old narrator lives in a world where the government controls everything: what school they go to, who they text, who they marry. She believes her mother suicide because of her love, taken away and killed. Now she lives with her Aunt Carol and Uncle William, and her cousins. She believed everything they told her. She waited for the cure. She was excited. Until she met

Then she starts seeing him everywhere. When she was supposed to get her choice of husbands, when she was on a daily run with her best friend, Hana. Alex has a fake mark of the cure, using it to prove to people he’s not an Invalid. Invalid’s are people who are infected, who don’t do the ‘cures’, people who don’t believe in the cure. People nobody wants. He likes Lena from the day he saw her, finally able to meet her on the day of her test. “That’s the thing about faith. It works,” (Oliver, Requiem), he whispers to Lena, trying to make her understand that life isn’t all about

Basically Lena, the main character, wants to be. Hana has the power to make bos look at her, the power to turn the world with her smile. But there’s one thing nobody knows: she doesn’t believe in the cure. She listens to restricted songs, reads unapproved books, poems even. She often finds herself in concerts with boys, and when Lena finds out, she’s mad. She finds Hana doing the things she wants to do, but is too afraid to. Her Aunt Carol doesn’t like Lena’s friendship with Hana. She says that they both come from different stars, and they’ll end like it too. By different stars, she means how Hana lives in a mansion, while Lena can barely use the AC. Turns out she’s right. At the end, Lena runs away to the Wilds, a place for the Invalids, while Hana decides to stay. “Turns out you’re braver than I am.” (24. 63), Hana tells Lena. Then there’s the Regulators. They force everyone to believe in the cure, they take love away from them. And you know what those people do? They believe them. The Regulators run through houses, kill Invalids if they find them, search them, run through their ID’s, every chance they get. They’re the people everyone hates. “Even when you didn’t do anything wrong, it makes you jumpy.” (13.