Dystopian Literature In The Village

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In The Village, I have found that all six of the common patterns of dystopian literature are present. For clarification, dystopia is an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or degraded society. It is the opposite of utopia which is an ideal place or state. The characteristics and patterns of dystopian literature are all shown in this movie. The movie shows, with help from the themes and characters in The Village, a town attempting to appear innocent to nature and humankind but failing. Or an attempt at a utopian society that turns to dystopia. The six themes of dystopian literature are as follows: First, an attempt at perfection. Second, rules and boundaries established to maintain the society’s …show more content…

Fifth, a consequence for those who rebel. And lastly, a realization of a character, the audience, or both that the society portrayed is not perfect. As a brief run-down of the film, we first meet a quiet boy named Lucius Hunt. He was very good friends with a special needs boy named Noah Percy. In the beginning of the movie, Lucius asks the elders of the village for permission to go to the village to get medicine to help Noah. The elders refuse and life continues on. It seems to the audience that there is a line that is beside the Covington woods. The people are not allowed to pass the line because there are “the people who we don’t speak of” that wear red cloaks. The elders of the village dress up as the people in red and come into the town one night and mark the doors in red and kill livestock and skin them. The village people do not know that these people are the elders. Life goes on and Lucius and Ivy have decided to get married. Ivy is Noah’s love and Noah gets upset. Noah stabs Lucius until Lucius is barely living. Ivy, who is blind, travels into the woods through Covington woods. By now, Ivy’s father has told Ivy that the people in red are fake. Ivy sets off into the …show more content…

The patterns are an attempt at perfection and then the rules and boundaries established to maintain the society’s way of life. “This town was built on and was maintained in order to keep the innocence. “That in the end is what we have protected here, innocence” -Edward Walker. Mr. Walker presents us with the first pattern in dystopian literature, the attempt at a perfect society. He is telling the other elders in the town why they built this town. We as the audience find out later that all the elders lost a family member because of the violence in the town and this is their attempt at a perfect society. On to the second of the dystopian patterns, it is suggested that Noah got the berries from past the line. The line is drawn from torches and flags hanging along the border of the village. This is one form of boundary put in place, but other boundaries can be seen in the movie such as non-material boundaries such as the mental boundary of the elders telling the people of the village not to

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