A Spiritual Musing

"Then you shoot me," I say furiously, shoving the weapons back at him. "You shoot me and go home and live with it!"  And as I say it, I know death right here, right now, would be...easier... 
~The Hunger Games 

And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling gibbering manikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him.  There was a hiss like a great mouthful of spittle banging a red-hot stove, a bubbling and frothing as if salt had been poured over a monstrous black snail to cause a terrible liquefaction and a boiling over of yellow foam.  Montag shut his eyes, shouted, shouted, and fought to get his hands at his ears to clamp and to cut away the sound.
~Fahrenheit 451

Pain, agony, excruciation; burning, fire, coals; identity, identity, identity.
The backwards worlds depicted by dystopian adventure novels.

"What is it with the masses who mindlessly read these books with such succulent satisfaction?  These books are horrible and vice-ridden.  They are bloody, they are sad, they are full of sacrifice, murder, and lost love.  They teach us evil.  My daughter mimics Katniss; my son mimics Gale.  I find myself thinking like Montag, like Haymitch, like Four.  The books will be our destruction."

The voices of those concerned with modern-day novels ring true to the above paragraph.

If you brush aside the thick, dusty layer of Edward-versus-Jacob fangirls, the I-want-to-be-like-Peeta-Mellark fanboys, and all the grime in between, what are you finding?  Is it mimicry?  Is it disdain?  Is it a desire to transcend?

Yes.

But wait.

First, take a large step back.  Very far back.  Israel, Babylon, Ancient Greece, Rome - Plutarch, Livy, Hammurabi, Gilgamesh, Plato, the Pentateuch.  Who played the central role in their stories and literature works?  God, gods, the hierarchy of the heavens.  Disproving gods, worshipping gods, ignoring gods, gods, gods, gods.
Then a short step forward.  Renaissance, the Neo-Classical era, the Romantic era.  Who played the central role in their books and self-help novels?  Man.  Does man need to be more creative, or does man need to be more rational and restrained?  Should man seek logic and order or should man seek random wildness?

We sought salvation in our written works.
Each story, no matter how absurd or menacing, is merely a copy of the Gospel.
In the ancient times, we, mankind, sought salvation from the gods; our gods were the protagonists, and our gods aided us to victory, to satisfaction, to happiness.  But did we ever feel our gods' deliverance outside of their papyrus pages?
No.
Then what of man?  Did we ever find what we sought for in ourselves by Neoclassicism or Romanticism?  By Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, was anyone of us capable of mastering the thirteen virtues?  Was happiness obtained?
No.
Wars went on, fights still held, people died.  Broken love, broken life, broken media, broken politics, broken economics, broken, broken, broken.  Shattered, smashed, cremated, and the ashes burned again, then scattered, not in a single river, but over an ocean, one dust particle for every square mile.

Another step forward.
Modern day.
Mankind already "proved" that gods cannot save us, that man cannot save himself...
...then what?
What are we seeking?

Dystopian novels are only the logical gut-reflex to this dilemma.  Either we push aside those voices hissing in our ears, saying, "You have no hope, you have no hope, you are not happy, not happy at all," or we admit our failure.  If we truly recognize our loss, which many good authors do, we cannot live on by merely blinding ourselves to our reality.
Finally, mankind, though subconsciously, is realizing that he is HELPLESS.  In thriller books, romance books, especially those books with dark, confused characters who shroud themselves in a misty haze of their own base need for survival, readers seek to find identity and blame the blur of voices on the portion of the world that would choose to blind themselves to reality.

So.

Can you now see the logic in modern day dystopian novels?
By process of elimination, we, collective mankind, have ruled out all sources of salvation, beginning with God Himself.  Postmodernism pervades our world, saying there is no truth while, on the contrary, there is truth, but we have already unanimously denied it as a lie.

If you're a Christian author, I challenge you to define right from wrong in your novels.  Sure, you could do something interesting like Divergent, where the main character has no idea if what she is doing is good or evil, but please, please, please make it known that, in the end, your character did make the right choice, even if the sacrifice is heavy.

Write on!
Clove