The Unwedding

Condie positions the grief and trauma that her protagonist, Ellery, carries after surviving a fatal accident alongside her students and her best friend Abby as an emotional undercurrent, running under and informing the primary action of the novel. Throughout The Unwedding, Ellery offers a powerful example of living with traumatic grief and survivor’s guilt. Throughout the narrative, Condie represents grief as a constant, and obtrusive pain for survivors of traumatic events—a force that impacts Ellery physically: she is “electric with grief” (9), “mired in grief” (16), and “frozen in grief” (288). As a result of this trauma, “nothing [feels] right, ever” in Ellery’s body (19). She imagines herself as “a brain thinking about things it shouldn’t and nerve endings reaching out in every direction” (30). These passages demonstrate the physical nature of grief, which can be literally painful for survivors like Ellery. She describes the fatal accident as something “that was so dark it followed [her] everywhere” (45). Even two years after the accident, Ellery is surprised at “how pain could compound on pain, how you could hurt, and hurt, and hurt […] how much you could feel, over and over again” (45).