The Chrysalids

Waknuk was a very close, tight community. In today’s date we consider a tight community; a place where everyone knows everyone, where everyone is ever the same, and where you knew everything about everyone. It was also very hard to become part of that community. This was very much like Waknuk. Waknuk was a community of the “norm’. They did not allow deviations or mutants, whether it was human, animal, or crop. They felt it was not god’s image of man. They would burn or send anything that was not the “norm” away. You would be inspected as a baby and killed if you were a mother that gave birth to amore than three kids that were deviations. The Waknuk people went to great measures, was it all justifiable, understandable, or forgivable?

Tribulation was what the Waknuk people called the nuclear holocaust. The nuclear holocaust was what changed people, and was what made their behavior so out of place. Tribulation was a scary thing, and was what caused them to have so much fear. The Waknuk people were scared it would happen again. All their technology was lost, except for the stem engine. They believed god was punishing them for not sticking to the true image of man, and for becoming too advanced. They began to forget and block out the memory of the nuclear holocaust which made then even more scared that they were not doing things right. There behavior was understandable in that fear was something that controlled them into not knowing how to handle it. They made themselves insane by their fear controlling them. Fear is a very powerful thing, it makes you do things you would never think of doing, or things you know are wrong but couldn’t help yourself. In the final chapters of The Chrysalids when Rosemary, Petra, and David were getting away from Waknuk, they persistently said that the men chasing them must be scared of them. They thought the men were going to great measures to capture them because they were scared that they could talk to one another in ways that they couldn’t, they were scared they were going to kill them.

Being scared for something is ok and wanting to fix what you’re scared of is also ok, but a person should know right from wrong. It was not justified in the fact that a war killed both the fringe people and the Waknuk people. The Waknuk people’s behavior did not help them with their fear; it hindered them to their deaths. The Waknuk people knew what they were doing was wrong, but they continued to do so because of their fear taking over them.