Allegiant Friendship

Tobias realizes that true friendship isn't dependent on how long you've known a person. Time is relative. You can feel like you've had a connection forever with a person you just met.

Tris comes up with this idea as she realizes that she and Cara are actually friends, despite the fact that Cara is (was) "Erudite." With that word erased, Tris can finally see Cara for the person she truly is, and appreciate her for her strengths.

It's hard to imagine that Jeanine even had friends, and even more difficult to see her being friends with Tris's dad. What do you think the two saw in each other? A shared passion for decoupage or scrapbooking?

Tris assumes that because Christina and Uriah are close, they must be getting to third base. But they're not. (At least, not yet.) Do you think Christina and Uriah would have formed a romance if he hadn't died? (Sorry, Uriah.) Or would they have just stayed friends?

Over the course of Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant, Tris loses many friends. She knows that friendship is a finite resource, like water or Twinkies, and that makes it really difficult for her to cope with Uriah's death. A good friend cannot easily be replaced.

Amar raises an interesting question. Tobias has a lot of people he spends time with, but are any of them actually his friends? If he keeps so much of himself private, can he ever have true friendships with someone?

We talked about the "friendship as a finite resource" thing above. When your number of friends has dwindled down to single digits, life can be hard. But Tris tries to remind Cara that even one good friend makes life worth living.

Why do you think Christina and Tris remain such close friends, even after everything Tris does that affects Christina... like that time she shot her boyfriend?

This is a big step for Tris, who always picked her friends based on their faction and didn't seem to even consider being friends with someone in a different faction. By the end of the novel, she knows that she can be friends with people based on their individual traits and personalities, not based on how society labels them.

Tobias (who, as we mentioned, has a little friendship problem) realizes at the end that his friends are the only way he can cope with Tris's death. He can't be an island, trying to do everything himself. He has to learn to lean on people.