'Trend In Connie Willis' The Bellwether

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Humans’ actions and behaviors have been studied throughout time to get a gage on why things trigger us to act a certain way. In the Bellwether, Connie Willis uses a trend-happy society to discuss how simple trends in daily life influence our actions and how quickly these trends can change. Wills wants to express how the leader gets others to follow their actions and why humans as a society try to fit into the common things around them. The idea of someone taking the first step into starting a new trend or being the leader was discussed in the Bellwether as a bellwether. A bellwether in the story was a sheep that looked like every other sheep. However, the bellwether according to Shirl is, “A little hungrier and a little greedier”, (pg 167). From this definition, a bellwether would do things …show more content…
Throughout the novel, Flip by the definition presented above was a bellwether. Flip was determined to create an anti-smoking environment at the workplace which leads to different regulations and bans for smoking at work. Also, Flip’s no smoking ban led to Sandra losing her experiment since Shirl had smoked a little in Bennett’s lab where the sheep were being kept which effects the air pollution. Smoking was already considered bad but because of Flip, Shirl and many others in society decided they were going to give up smoking. Along with the smoking trend, Flip got a brand of an ‘I’ on her forehead and wore duct tape around her wrist. Both ideas were shown to be worn by others in a society like the different waitresses and waiters that Sandra encountered at the different restaurants. In the Bellwether the idea of society following trends was displayed in almost every chapter. Humans are a species seem to have the need to fit in with everyone else that is around them and not stand out too much. Through the book, many of the trends would pick up quite quickly. An example of a trend that swept through the

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