This thesis examines Hugh Howey’s Wool (2013), a major contribution to twenty-first-century dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, within the conceptual framework advanced by the French poststructuralist thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The study deals with how processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation are depicted in Wool and the ways in which these processes shape the protagonist’s experiences of resistance, transformation, and flight. To this aim, a qualitative, interpretive approach was adopted, based on a close thematic and characterological analysis of the novel. The study focused on Deleuzeoguattarian concepts such as assemblage, becoming, rhizomatic connections, deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation, and the distinction between smooth and striated space. The analysis demonstrated that in this novel the silo operates as a highly striated assemblage, characterised by rigid hierarchies, disciplinary codes, and ideological myths that enforce obedience. By contrast, the outside world and Silo 17 are depicted as smooth spaces: heterogeneous, open-ended, and risky, yet also offering the possibility of lines of flight. It was also argued that through characters such as Holston, Allison, and Juliette, the novel dramatises the tension between confinement and freedom, showing how ideology reterritorialises subjects into submission. Juliette, however, embodies the process of becoming, resisting the mythologising structures of the silo and enacting a line of flight that is not only physical but also ontological, creating new spaces of possibility. The study concluded that Wool reflects broader questions of power, resistance, and change. It shows that lines of flight are not inherently liberating: Holston’s and Allison’s failed escapes reveal how flight without transformation collapses, while Juliette’s journey illustrates how freedom can be sustained through becoming and alliance. Ultimately, from this perspective, the novel functions not only as dystopian fiction but also as a philosophical meditation on the dangers and possibilities of human liberation.
