Study Guide

Allegiant The Home

By Veronica Roth

The Home

Chapter 10: Tobias

Tobias "Four" Eaton: "Too many bad memories here. I'm ready to leave." (10.141)
Tobias has tons of bad memories attached to the city, so is it still his home? Or does he not even have a home? Do you have to like your home for it to be a home?
Beatrice "Tris" Prior: "I'm really going to miss this place," [Tris] says. (10.132)
Are you surprised that Tris is going to miss Chicago? (At this point, she doesn't even know the city is called Chicago.) Why would she miss it? Maybe we miss places where we've grown and where things have happened to us, even if some of these things have been bad.

Chapter 16: Tobias
: "Here at least there's clean water and food and safety." (16.39)
"So we overlook what basically amounts to genocide in order to continue making the Bureau of Genetic Welfare our home." Can you build your home on the unhappiness and misfortune of others?

Chapter 17: Tris

Beatrice "Tris" Prior: Chicago. It's so strange to have a name for the place that was always just home to me. It makes the city smaller in my mind. (17.41)
Labeling the city makes it seem smaller to Tris. Labeling does that in general. Tris realizes the same thing about being labeled "Dauntless" or "Divergent": it makes her seem smaller than she actually is.

Chapter 19: Tris
: "Chicago takes up about two hundred twenty-seven square miles," says Zoe. "The land area of the planet is a little less than two hundred million square miles. The percentage is… so small as to be negligible." (19.52)
Some of Tris's friends have a hard time with the fact that their city is, in fact, so small. We wonder how they would feel if they were from, like, Paris, TX or something. Why do they need their city to be the only thing there is?
Uriah: "I don't know," Uriah says, and he sounds serious now. "I'm not sure anywhere will feel like home again. Not even if we went back." (19.87)
Uriah (and everyone else) has been lied to both by the people of Chicago and by the people of the Bureau. A place can't feel like home if it's built on lies.

Chapter 26: Tris

Beatrice "Tris" Prior: I was beginning to feel that I had finally found a place to stay, a place that was not so unstable or corrupt or controlling that I could actually belong there. You would think that I would have learned by now—such a place does not exist. (26.10)
Well, that's a discouraging way of thinking. We hate to agree with her, but it is hard to find a place that isn't corrupt or controlling in some way. Tris has to learn to create a home that is safe, even if it's within a larger space of evil.

Chapter 35: Tobias

Tobias "Four" Eaton: We can pretend that we don't belong there [in Chicago] anymore, while we're living in relative safety in this place, but we do. We always will. (35.44)
As Tobias prepares to return to Chicago, he realizes that while his hometown might not actually be a place he'd ever consider home, it'll always be a part of him because he grew up there.

Chapter 42: Tobias

Tobias "Four" Eaton: Chicago will be safe, the Bureau will be forever changed, and Tris and I will be able to build a new life for ourselves somewhere. (42.20)
Tobias is a runner. The city isn't home, so he leaves. The Bureau isn't home, so he wants to leave. Will he be able to build a new life somewhere else, or will he eventually leave that place, too? Will there ever be a place that will suit him? Or is home more of a mental thing?

Chapter 56

Tobias "Four" Eaton: I pull up to the house near the stop sign, with the cracked front walk. My house. (56.2-56.3)
It's fitting that Tobias returns to his house at the end of the novel—not to live there, but to say goodbye. As we've seen from other quotes, the city of Chicago was never home to Tobias… but it's still a part of who he is.

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