Tally Youngblood Themes

In a dystopian world masquerading as a utopia, a soon to be sixteen-year-old heroine, Tally Youngblood, embarks upon a journey that will change her world in Scott Westerfield’s young adult novel Uglies. The book revolves around a futuristic totalitarian state that relies heavily upon technology and one in which individuals are divided into different age groups, upon turning twelve children known as Littlies leave their parents homes to live in the dorms of Uglyville where they continue to grow and learn in preparation for the Surge—a procedure that is performed on the sixteenth birthday transforming the ‘ugly’ young adults into Pretties (Westerfield). The goal of citizens is to become Pretty and move to New Pretty Town where they have the next ten years to party and fall in love which is almost what Tally succeeds at doing until she meets, Shay, who teaches Tally of the Smoke after befriending her and then running away; Tally is forced to follow Shay’s obscure directions under threat of never becoming Pretty to find Shay and her fellow rebels in
In postmodern theory, we learn of postproduction: “…it refers to the point in which society is not inventing anything new…Many contemporary artists and authors have found these ideas fascinating to explore. Through visual communication and literary methods, they have taken these ideas related to the exploration of identity, history, and culture and found new ways to represent this way of analytical thinking…” (Fischer 30). Postmodernism is a typical style for, “writers of a humanism that felt profoundly threatened.” (Bradbury 766). Westerfield shows a trend towards postproduction when he prompts his reader to think by allowing them to move past the dialogue he had given to his characters, in example we have this conversation between Tally and Shay in the months before the