The Cake is a Lie

For over three billion years, countless generations of our ancestors have struggled to give us the life we have today. They dragged themselves out of the ocean, crawled their way up the food chain and survived at least five mass extinctions. Tens of millions of generations fought desperately all their lives just so they could reproduce to ultimately create you and I.

The whole series past the first five minutes/40 pages is merely the hallucination brought on by the test Tris undergoes to determine which faction she is in. As she struggles through the passions and sorrows of the next three books, she is merely sat in the chair, her reactions and choices being monitored and assessed.

There are no Divergents in the real world and 'divergence' is merely a living metaphor for the uncertainty of which faction Tris truly belongs to. The majority of those she meets and interacts with are nothing but simulacra that represent key choices, the rest - people she knows in real life - are but familiar faces conjured in an opium dream.

At the end of the final movie, as the last book closes, Tris is awoken. After what seems like months (yet merely minutes have passed) she is given her answer.