We just need a little Violet in us

Violet Duran being a protagonist of the novel “Feed” by M.T Anderson stood out the most. To me she wasn't just some girl, she was different. Titus was drawn to her and from the minute he and his friends started talking to her at the moon, they noticed she wasn't like them. Violet had her feed implanted in her brain when she was seven years old due to her parent’s financial situation. She is also home schooled by her father who is a professor who teaches the dead language. Both her parents didn't have the feed and were even hesitated about getting it for Violet. Until Violet's father figured it was necessary for his daughter due to the generation she was going to grow up in and because of the job interview. He stated “Then one day, when her mother had left, and I needed work, I was in a job interview. I was an excellent candidate. Two men were interviewing me. Talking about this and that. Then they were silent, just looking at me. I grew uncomfortable. Then they began looking at each other, and doing what I might call smirking. I realize that they had chatted me, and that I had not responded. They found this funny desirable. That a man would not have a feed. So they were chatting about me in my presents. Teasing me when I could not hear. Free to assess me as they would, right in front of me. I did not get the job. It was thus that I realize that my daughter would you need the feed. She had to live in the world. (228)" He knew in order for his daughter to fully function in their society and not become an outcast, she needed the feed. Violet shows off her intelligence numerous times throughout the book, to the point where Titus’s friends and even father think she is snotty and a show-off, even calling her a bitch. Titus thought Violet lacked the basic social intelligence that tells you to adapt to the world around you. But Violet refused to give into the feed and adapting, which led her to resist the feed. This decision she makes is making her unpopular, but it also makes her a rebel, in a way, making her a role model for being above the influence. She's grown up in a whole other world due to the way she was raised by her father. She keeps up with current events and doesn't buy into every new trend when everyone else is buying it to fit in. That's why she comes up with the idea of resisting the feed by making herself invisible to it. Once everyone got hacked at the party by this old man protesting and yelling “We enter a time of calamity. Blood on the tarmac. Fingers in the juicer. Towers of air frozen in the lunar waster. Models dead in the runways, with their legs facing backward. Children with smiles that can’t be undone. Chicken shall rot in the aisles. See the pillars fall (39)” Meaning the world they were living in is so damage due to what humankind did to it and destroyed it. Towards the end of the novel, Titus talks about how everyone’s hair and skin falls off, “My mom had lost so much skin you could see her teeth even when her mouth was closed (284)” M.T Anderson made sure Violet's character stood out the most. This novel is a wake-up call. Violet represents change, resistance, and rebel. She was a much bigger person than what the feed had to offer and she ultimately didn't give in. The feed is the media and mostly everyone wanted to fit in and have the latest stuff. For example the whole thing with the lesions, where people were getting them cosmetically all over their skin! At Links party where Violet couldn't take how people were just ignoring what was happening in their world and having fun by looking over everything that was going wrong. Where her body was self-destructing because of the hacking, due to her feed being installed after her brain was more developed causing her body to malfunction. She couldn't take it anymore in a game of spin the bottle, so she started yelling “Look at us! You don’t have the feed! You are the feed! You’re being eaten! You’re raised for food! Look at what you've made yourselves! (202)” Even if we may not realize it, but even in our society today we sometimes give into things that the media shows off as the latest thing. Towards the end Titus even realizes the truth, he stated “It turned out that my upcar was not the kind of upcar my friends rode in. I don’t know why. It had enough room, but for some reason people didn't think of it that way. Sometimes that made me feel kind of tired. It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly caught up to it (279)” This just proves the overall aims of this novel, the more we try to fit in and buy or do anything the media says to do or presents as the next big thing, it will physically and mentally exhaust us and we would ultimately give into the mass media. From what I got out this novel was that the whole mankind abuses technology and how we let the media control us. Sometimes it’s just hard to resist. We all just need a little Violet in us.

-Jordan