Examples Of Individuality In Anthem By Ayn Rand

Individuality allows every person to be themselves and be different from each other. However, In Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem, Rand describes a society where the people were not allowed to openly be themselves, or else they would be punished for being different. The main character, Equality, notices he is different slowly throughout the novella, but kept continuing to be like everyone else for awhile. These rules exist in this society to strip human individuality in order to achieve total equality.

It is a struggle for people not to be able to think freely. However, the Council in Anthem has forbidden individual thoughts. They worked to create a society where everyone is supposedly defined as equal. These rules cause Equality to believe he is evil for not being able to prevent his individual thoughts. Equality thinks he is a sinner for thinking outside of his

Once Equality read the books, he learned about Gaea and Prometheus. They renamed themselves those names, which shows that they will allow individual names in their new society, rather than keeping the names they were given in their old society, which were ordinary names to make sure nobody was more important than the other. Originally, Prometheus was named “Equality 7-2521” and Gaea was named “Liberty 5-3000.” The numbers suggest that other people had the same names, which means that they didn’t have their own individual names while living in their society of total equality. For the future generations, Prometheus had created a new way to live--a better, more equal way of life. Since Prometheus and Gaea chose their own names, they started to create a new sense of individualism for the future generations to come. Here, it is proven that Prometheus will not have the rule of being assigned ordinary names, because he changed his name and Liberty’s to represent their