Abstract

The Expedition is a novel that follows teenagers Duncan and Rose in the walled city of Dreslin. Both teens struggle to conform to the roles placed on them by their gender and class. Duncan, the scrawny son of poor factory workers, runs away to join an expedition beyond the city’s walls in an attempt to affirm his masculinity. Rose, the eldest daughter of a family precariously balanced on the periphery of the city’s elite, feels stifled by the expectations placed upon her to “secure” her family’s position through marriage. She begins to question the hierarchies she’s lived under her entire life.
Duncan’s expedition and his attempts to embody the stoic masculinity his city valorizes are both abject failures. Amidst an ever-mounting pile of bodies, Duncan comes to question and eventually rejects the values that caused him to sign up in the first place.
Parallel to Duncan’s expedition, Rose watches a full-scale workers' revolt, violently put down by the very powers that keep her family comfortable. While her engagement with the revolt is initially filtered through the windows of her family home in the wealthy part of the city, she, much like Duncan, eventually witnesses the violence of her society firsthand. While washing blood from her hair, Rose realizes that the only moral thing to do is to rebel. The novel tackles topics of class struggle, gender roles, and the fascist weaponization of toxic masculinity.