Question

Comparison of uglies and pretties novels

Answer 1

Summary It is set in a future post-scarcity dystopian world in which everyone is turned "Pretty" by extreme cosmetic surgery upon reaching age 16. It tells the story of teenager Tally Youngblood who rebels against her society's enforced conformity, after her new found friends Shay and David take her to a rebel society called the Smoke and show her the downsides to becoming a "pretty." Written for young adults, Uglies deals with adolescent themes of change, both emotional and physical. The book is the first in what was originally a trilogy, The Uglies series which includes Pretties and Specials. The series has now has been extended with the publication of a fourth novel, Extras. Organizational Patterns Uglies is organized into parts and chapters. Each of the three parts has a subtitle and a quote from modern-day American life. Part I is called “Turning Pretty” with the quote “Is it not good to make society full of beautiful people?” from Yang Yuan, quoted in The New York Times. Part II is called “The Smoke” with the quote “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in that proportion” from Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, in “Of Beauty.” Part III is called “Into the Fire” with the quote “Beauty is that Medusa’s head/ Which men go armed to seek and sever./ It is most deadly when most dead,/ And dead will stare and sting forever” by Archibald MacLeish, from “Beauty.” The three parts each mark a change in Tally’s thinking, from wanting to be pretty, to joining the Smoke, to wanting to change her society. The Central Question From the back cover: “Everybody gets to be supermodel Barber, BYU, 2010 gorgeous. What could be wrong with that?” Of course, the book explores what exactly is wrong with everyone looking flawless and biologically symmetrical. This is such a good question for adolescents to consider, since many of them, at first glance, would probably love to get the operation! Themes Body Image The novel addresses a very relevant question: would we be happy if we could look perfect? In a society so obsessed with looks, this theme will resonate with many students. The book complicates coming up with a simple answer to this question. It does not advocate unhealthiness; in fact, school children learn about the old days “before the operation…a lot of people, especially young girls, became so ashamed at being fat that they stopped eating…that was one of the reasons they’d come up with the operation. No one got the disease anymore, since everyone knew at sixteen they’d turn beautiful” (200). Not everything is bad about the operation. But Tally has to decide whether looking beautiful is worth more than her friendship with Shay and the people at the Smoke. She also has to choose between staying with perfect-looking Peris or average-looking David. She learns that beauty is more than skin deep. Individuality Tally learns the terrible secret about the operation that makes people look pretty. The government also makes your brain “pretty,” by putting lesions in the brains of pretties, which take out any inclination to free-thinking or rebellion. “Maybe the reason war and all that other stuff went away is that there are no more controversies, no disagreements, no people demanding change. Just masses of smiling pretties, and a few people left to run things” (267). She comes to understand that freedom is more important that having fun all the time or always looking g