“Anthem” by Ayn Rand takes us on a journey through the eyes of a young man named Equality 72521 living in the future in which people have lost all knowledge of individualism and where all decisions are made by committee the Council. Equality 72521 struggles immediately from the beginning of the story because he is “cursed” by being intelligent and inquisitive and having individual thought, which is against the society in which he lives in. Growing up as a young boy, his dream is to become a scientist and work on new discoveries and inventions. Instead, at fifteen years old, Equality 72521 is assigned by the Council to a menial job of being a street sweeper. His daytoday life is very routine and mundane and he rebels against this life and starts conducting research in a secret tunnel where he discovers and recreates electricity. He also defies the ‘rules” by trespassing into an open field where he comes to find friendship with a woman – a forbidden act of his society. One day the Council finds him coming back late one night from the tunnel and throws him in jail where he is viciously …show more content…
I think. I will.” (page 94) For the first time Equality 72521 is realizing that as a human being, he exists, which means he has the ability to think. With the ability to think for one’s self comes the ability to carry out actions and to do things for one’s self. The quote symbolizes that when applied to life, Equality 72521 has free will a choice in how he lives, his own destiny and the path that he wants to follow. In Anthem, the society is one in which everyone is equal and no one is superior to anyone else. However, society comes with a price as no one is able to think or speak for themselves. When Equality 72521 realizes that he can think and speak for himself in his “new world” then his new reality stems from
Equality 7-2521 doesn’t like what the council of vocations assigned his job for the rest of his life. He was always different from his brothers and people look at him like. Equality 7-2521 always wanted to be apart of the home of the scholars and learn more things. While doing his job equality sees an a dark tunnel that lead to thing from the unmentionable. He sneaks off to the tunnel to mess with this box that he found while roaming the tunnels one night.
Equality has learned his reading teaches him that persons are individuals, not splintered fragments of the group; they have no right to pursue their happiness, and should not be sacrifice themselves for others; that they require freedom to do this, and must not be enslaved by the group. The overall Theme would be the actual word Ego it was talked in the story about how it means a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance. Equality 7-2521 was mainly focusing on telling us that the ending he wanted us to learn was that it’s your conscious mind, the part of identify that you consider “yourself”. In Latin it would mean ‘self’ or “I”.
In the opening pages of Anthem, Equality 7-2521 gives much background knowledge of the society he lives and the horrible details of the laws and regulations they have created. Along with that he explains that he has committed a grave sin already which is writing and that in doing so it doesn’t allow him to live, tagged with other misdeeds in which is labeled as “transgressions.” Being categorized as a Street Sweeper he has unwinded the discovery of a hidden tunnel that once existed during the Unmentionable Times. "Since the Council does not know of this hole, there can be no law permitting to enter it.
so when he finds his tunnel he decides to steal stuff from the home of the scholar’s so he can study and try to learn and invent something new. Eventually he discovers electricity and electric light one night in his tunnel. He knew that if he was caught he would be sent to prison and whipped. He begins to realize he is spending his time in the tunnel because “ he wishes to do it for himself.”
This essay will be discussing whether or not the character Equality 7-2521’s assessment of his sins towards throughout of the book he’s from, Anthem. His assessment (that he doesn’t care about his sin, as it was decided a sin by a government he sees as immoral and corrupt) is in my opinion, correct. This thought stems mainly from the fact he documented his thoughts throughout the book, and the documents could potentially inspire other people to do the same thing he did, which Equality would probably like. At the beginning of Anthem, Equality feels ashamed with many actions of his, specifically calling many of them evil, sinful, or a “transgression”.
Even so, our protagonist, Equality 7-2521 presents his new invention to the Council, standing by himself fueled by his own ideas- something forbidden by the society. Victoria Woodhull did the same thing, advocating for her causes although they were opposed by many at the time—even
Unlike during the Unmentionable Times, when men created “towers [that] rose to the sky,” it is an affliction to be born with powerful intellectual capacity and ambition in Ayn Rand’s apocalyptic, nameless society in Anthem. Collectivism is ostensibly the moral guidepost for humanity, and any perceived threat to the inflexible, authoritarian regime is met with severe punishment. The attack on mankind’s free will and reason is most evident in the cold marble engraving in the Palace of the World Council: “We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever” (6). Societal norms force homogeneity and sacrifice among all people.
Equality finds a tunnel that he thinks is from the “unmentionable times” is his society while he was street sweeping. He goes down in it and finds smooth hard surfaces which I inferred to be glass, in Anthem all objects are raw materials so it is not possible for there to be glass unless the council was hiding the tunnel so no one could find it. He returns to the house of street sweepers late and the council asks where he has been. He refuses to tell them so he gets taken somewhere by the council and they try to whip the information out of him. “ A grill, a grill, a grill” Equality says.
For Liberty is so beautiful and “glowing” that she cannot be ignored. It, however, is against the commandments of Equality’s brotherhood to peruse her, as it would unbalance the mutual emotion between all men by creating preference. In a wretched battle of nature vs nurture, Equality finds that despite these regulations, he cannot stop himself from yearning for Liberty, whom serves as “blade of iron” cutting through to the undeniable truth that Equality is a selfish being, generally motivated by his own personal
The first allusion the author made was towards the Declaration Of Independence. For example, “the declaration of independence said that ‘there are certain inalienable rights for the people, and among them are life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness… we hold the view that all men are created equal’... did they mean to say that all men are created equal but one person was born to inherit $10,000,000,000 [ten billion dollars] and another man was born to inherit nothing?” (Long 11) In the quote, the author elucidates to readers that no man should have an unfair advantage over another by making a reference to the declaration of independence.
And I can see from the outside in, driven by the old voices of childhood and lost in anger and fear.” This quote explains how a child could be effected with racist comments. Although it happened when she was a child, the racist comments came back to her because that’s what she believes she was. This ties in with Americans having equal opportunities because it shows how one could be affected by racism. If the American government was to restrict every race
The sentence I picked says “Equality is but an empty illusion when the rich, through monopolies, have the decision of life or death over their own kind.” Here he is explaining that there is no equality because the rich have the decision of life and
In the novella Anthem, individual rights and freedom do not exist. The word “I” is prohibited to be spoken by men. Equality 7-2521 is a street sweeper of the city and he is different from the others in the society. Equality is more intelligent, taller, learns quicker, and he enjoys learning about science; especially how things move and work. Since the word “I” is the unspeakable word, Equality uses the word “We” to resemble that he is doing these actions .
“We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever” (Rand 19). How can an individual be a hero in a collectivist society? In The Anthem, a novella by Ayn Rand, the protagonist, Equality 7-2521 is portrayed as an archetypal epic hero. Equality 7-2521 exhibits the characteristics of an epic hero because he is capable of great deeds, he has a nemesis, and he experiences an event that leads to a quest.
¨We do not wonder at this new sin of ours. It is our second transgression of Preference, for we do not think of all our brothers, as we must, but only of one, and their name is Liberty 5-300. We do not know why we think of them” (Rand 41). In Ayn Randś dystopian novel, Anthem, the citizens are forced to think that they cannot have any preference, this includes liking someone more than others. Randś protagonist, Equality 7-2521, started the book falling in love with the Golden One, but as he moves toward individuality he begins to be in “love” less as he realizes there’s more than just being in a group.