Pretties (The Uglies) Literary Elements

Pretties (The Uglies) Literary Elements

Genre

science fiction

Setting and Context

fictional future; place names: New Pretty Town, Rusty Ruins

Narrator and Point of View

Narrator: omniscient
POV: third person

Tone and Mood

Tone: indirect
Mood: threatening, exciting

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonist: Tally Youngblood; Antagonist: the system of controlling people, Special Circumstances

Major Conflict

Tally and her pretty friends go to a costume party and there one of Tally's friends from the New Smoke approaches her telling her that he has a package for her, which he will secretly leave in one of the older buildings in the New Pretty Town.

Climax

Soon after Tally's arrival to the New Smoke a tracker is set off, meaning that the Special Circumstances know where they are and are coming to get them. Zane has to stay behind and Tally refuses to leave him. Both of them get captured by the Special Circumstances.

Foreshadowing

"Tally swore. The Specials had shown up so quickly last night. She'd only had a few minutes with Croy, as if they'd been waiting close by. Maybe they'd already spotted that the party had been hacked. Or maybe they were never very far away from Tally Youngblood…"

Understatement

"I'm sick of all the mix-ups and bad blood between us. From now on, you and I are going to be best friends forever."

—Shay saying this to Tally after Special Circumstances captured her and after Shay revealed herself as a new special.

Allusions

"The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Imagery

Imagery of nature and wilderness when Tally gets lost from the other Crims after their escape

Paradox

N/A

Parallelism

"All those weeks that Tally had been lost in the wild, all she'd ever wanted was to be back here with Peris, pretty in New Pretty Town."

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Classification of people: pretties, uglies etc. Crims are pretties who do rebellious things to feel alive.

Personification

N/A

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