In high school I took a dystopian fiction class. We read books like 1984, A Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, and The Handmaid’s Tale. All were good books that captivated me at the time and feel pertinent to today, but having just finished Parable of the Sower it made me realize the aspect of the genre we were missing. All those books took place under an oppressive, centralized, authoritarian government, and what I find fascinating about Parable of the Sower is the lack of “leadership.”
It’s not that the government or authority figures didn’t exist, it’s just that they were irrelevant. Life descended into a free for all and while the narrator talks about the president and cops, they aren’t central to the story in any meaningful way. The country’s been picked clean, burned down, and everyone is left to fend for themselves. The narrative keeps making the point that it doesn’t matter what the authority is doing wherever they are because everyone now has to shape their own world.
It’s interesting to read a novel of this type where the narrator’s goal isn’t to “beat” the bad guy or bring down the government because if you’ve ever read those books, that isn’t often successful unless you’re reading in the YA space. It just has me thinking about that movie Leave the World Behind and how a character says something about how “there is no plan, just chaos” and now I can’t decide which prospect is more frightening.
Add comment