“Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are
holy: ‘I will it!’” (Rand 94-95) By the end of Anthem, the main character, Equality 7-2521 has
undergone a transformation from an ignorant being that has intellectual potential, to an
extraordinary man who broke free of his society. By the end of the novel, Equality 7-2521 goes
from accepting his society’s assessment of sin to forming his own assessment. This assessment
that he eventually forms is suitable for him.
Rand depicts the setting of Anthem as a collectivist society where the word “I” is forbidden.
Society comes first in Anthem’s setting, and nobody is allowed to have a preference, whether it
be friendship or occupation. Members
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I think. I will.” (Rand 94) This sentence, spoken by Equality 7-2521 after he discovers the
word “I” for the first time, summarizes his moral assessment of sin. As Equality 7-2521 flees
from his society into the Uncharted Forest, he begins to reject society’s moral assessment of sin.
He starts when he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the stream. “Our body was not like the
bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straight and thin and hard and strong…. And
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We remembered it, and we
laughed.” (Rand 80) When he was immersed in society, Equality 7-2521 accepted that he was
evil because he was different. However, now, he sees that his differences are, and should not be
viewed as bad, and that he should not be ashamed of them. He also rejects his society’s ideas that
solitude is a bad thing. “If this is the great evil of being alone, then what is good and what is
evil?” (Rand 85) Equality 7-2521 not only realizes that solitude is not necessarily a bad thing,
but also that is not bad to take pride in individual actions, such as killing a bird to provide for
himself. He also has a change in how he thinks about others. “I choose my friends among men…
And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither
command nor obey.” (Rand 96) Society tells its members to love everyone of their society, and
that they should love each other equally. Equality 7-2521 thinks that instead, people need to pick
their friends based on how they treat each other. He believes that it is the individual’s choice, not
society’s, to decide friendships, as well as other relationships. Equality 7-2521 and his
Equality 7-2521 is rebellious. If a person is rebellious, he shows a desire to resist authority. This authority is most commonly a government that runs its territory in a way which the rebellious person does not support. Rebellious people argue for changing or replacing this authority because they often view it as corrupt or ineffective. Due to their desire for change, these people are often the most dangerous to governments that wish to retain power and control. Equality 7-2521 shows this desire to defy authority in Anthem. The society that he lives in forbids writing unless it is first approved by the Council of Vocations. However, he has done exactly
Many people seem to get entangled into society's customs. In the novel Anthem, the protagonist, Equality 7-2521, lives a period of his life as a follower. However, Equality eventually, tries to distant himself from his society. He is shaped to be a follower, but eventually emerges in to an individual and a leader. On his journey, he discovers the past remains of his community. Ayn Rand uses Equality's discoveries of self to represent the importance of individuality in a functional society.
Through this theme, the author hoped to denote the importance of religion and sins. Antonio is the perfect delineation of the irrefutable desires of man when he says, “And although I did not feel good about it, I ate the golden carrot. I had never eaten anything sweeter or juicier in my life.” (Anaya, 109). Despite knowing that it is a sin to take something of someone else’s without permission, Antonio, even if reluctant, still chooses to consume the carrot. He, being a religious boy who firmly believes in always performing good deeds, still chooses to indulge in wrongdoing and even ends up enjoying it. Antonio’s perspective on god significantly changes after discussing sins with Florence; “there seemed to be so many pitfalls in the questions we asked…would the knowledge of the answers make me share in the original sin of Adam and Eve?” (113). Similar to the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Antonio consumes a vegetable that was not meant for him. He firmly believes that what happened in the Garden of Eden was a result of the irrevocable habit of man to sin; a habit now being attained to Antonio as well. However, shortly after performing this act which was almost identical to that of Adam and Eve, Antonio starts to question the beliefs
In Anthem there are so many rules and controls, yet there is one that truly rises above it all. And that word is “I”. There is no “I” only “We”, for the great “We” is what they follow. And they are one not individual, they are one. And poor Equality can’t seem to understand that the rules are rules, but in a way he’s making his own rules. And he is mistreated for his looks and appearance and dosen’t seem really one with his brothers. And he’s curious and most don’t even question life, and he notices the little things, “Yet as we stand at night in the great hall, removing our garments for sleep, we look upon our brothers and we wonder. The heads of our brothers are bowed. The eyes of our brothers are dull, and never do they look one another in the eyes. The shoulders of our brothers are hunched, and their muscles are drawn, as if their bodies were shrinking and wished to shrink out of sight. And a word steals into our mind, as we look upon our brothers, and that word is fear.”(Rand 46). He has a wanting to learn and build his knowledge, but the rules don’t permit his decisions.
Ayn Rand’s Anthem is a politically satirical novel set in a future society that is so highly collectivized that the word “I” has been banned. The world is governed by various councils who believe that man’s sole reason for existence is to enforce the Great Truth “that all men are one and that there is no will save the will of all men together” (Rand, 20). Any indication of an individual’s independent spirit is swiftly and brutally put down, with the transgressors being punished with severe prison sentences or even death. It is this dysfunctional world that Equality 7-2521 is born into. The novel begins with Equality 7-2521 alone in a dark tunnel, transcribing his story.
evil, but they do not phase him since he is insane. There is no question, Dr.
Anthem is based on a man name Equality 7-2521 who lives in a dark age in the future. From the start Equality 7-2521 thought he was cursed. He was smarter than most of the children his age and he got into a lot of trouble. Now he was taller and that a burden for him because most people are not his height and his teachers use to say that there was evil in his bones. He talked on how he was born with this curse and that it made him think about things nobody else wouldn’t. Since Equality 7-2521 though different on things, people treated him harder because they couldn’t understand him. He tried to stop by doing things other people could do but it didn’t work and usually got himself in trouble. Equality 7-2521 had to learned that changed
Growing up in a strict society with many rules, you realize how life should not be. For being your own individual is not a sin, but a benefit. Being your own individual is not only good for yourself, it is good for all of society. Being different benefits you and everyone around you in ways you may not even realize it. In the book Anthem, by Ayn Rand, society is nothing how it should be. The government not only controls what you do for a living, but it also controls how you speak, where you live, who you talk to, where to be and what to learn. The government does not turn Russia into a individualism country, but it turns it into a communist country. The people are to repeat “We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, Indivisible and forever” (19) every time they are tempted to think different. Equality 7-2521 was raised with the mentality of all men being alike. However, his own mentality has always been different from his brothers.
Christianity teaches that in order to be able to truly serve God, one must give up worldly pleasures, which are deemed selfish. Throughout literature, many authors touch on this subject, some in very direct manners. Such is the case in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and St. Augustine’s Confessions. In excerpts from each, the narrator describes how he had undergone a change from relishing in worldly and selfish activities to renouncing such immoral pleasures in order to follow the moral path to God. As each passage progresses, the narrator tells of his past and his new thinking in the present, and ends by praising God for His mercy. Throughout the passages, several dichotomies exist between the past and the present, positive and negative, moral and immoral. In the end, it is the mercy of God that acts as the driving force behind each man’s change in thoughts and actions. The moral laws of religion outweigh man’s desires, as can be seen through the diction in each passage as the narrator contrasts his negative past with the positive present by denying that which he once loved, and as he praises God for granting mercy for his sins.
In Anthem, Ayn Rand depicts Equality 7-2521 as a man whose intelligence surpasses that of his brothers. In the Home of the Students, Equality’s performance portrays a significant difference from his brothers’ learning capabilities. However, Equality lives in a collective society in which the Council of Vocations forbids one to have a higher level of intelligence than his brothers, for it is a sin to be intellectually superior to them. “It was not that the learning was too hard for us,” Equality explains. “It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick…The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked upon us” (21). The society finds Equality’s outstanding academic performance to
Anthem by Ayn Rand depicts a completely collectivist society, or one in which a person is required to give up his or her individuality for the good of the whole. The society does a lot to justify their opposition to individuality, but the main reason they do is for the idea of “ the common good”. Equality is taught to refer to himself as “we” to help enforce the idea that he is part of a whole, rather than an individual. From the beginning of the book, we know that Equality is stronger and smarter than many of his peers. So why was he sent to the House of the Street Sweepers? The society is afraid of people who are different, because they may interfere with their idea of a “perfect society”, in which everyone is the same. “And also they were not liked because they took pieces of coal and they drew pictures upon the walls, and they were pictures that made men laugh… so International 4-8818 were sent to the Home of the Street Sweepers, like ourselves. (29-30)” International 4-8818 and Equality were both assigned to the Home of the Street Sweepers because they wouldn’t conform to
In order to explain man’s path from the one to the other, he sets up a system of dichotomies that originate from Adam’s fall and are hinged upon the role of the will in earthly life. At the top, God is the source of the “supreme good,” and evil is its opposite (XII, 3). Up to this point, he is in agreement with the ancients, but he diverges again when he equates the good with nature, and evil with a defect of nature—an absence of the good (XII, 3). In this we have the first division of what “supremely is” between nature and vice, with nature arising ...
Augustine devotes much of his Confessions to a discussion of the nature of sin. He tells his story of when, as a young boy, he knocked pears off of a pear tree. Late one night, he went out with his friends and started to shake pears off the tree, not to eat them but to feed them to pigs. Upon reflection, Augustine realized that “The evil in me was not foul, but I loved it. I loved my own perdition and my own faults, not the things for the ...
There was a man by the name of Thomas of Elderfield who had a life full of ups and downs, but who never lost his faith in Christianity. He came from a poor family and worked his way up the social ladder to a successful business man. This climb up the social ladder was beneficial to him, but soon led to trouble as he attracted a suitor. After several years of infidelity with the suitor, Thomas’s conscious got to him and he discontinued seeing the married woman. His faith in God kept him from returning to her despite her repeated attempts at pulling him into sin. Thomas could not live with the weight of the sin on his shoulders so he went to a priest to confess what was causing him anguish and repent for his sins. “Eventually God's grace intervened and remorse stung him; so he presented himself to a priest and took his healthy advice to do proper penance for his offence,” (Malmesbury, par. 2). The woman remarried a man named George years after her first husband had passed away. In time George found out about his new wife’s previous infidelity...
The Book of Genesis begins with the depiction of the Fall, the ramifications of which are echoed throughout the Bible, such as in the case of the impiety of Noah’s son, Ham. To fully understand the connection of the Fall to Ham, it is necessary to examine the Fall, the nature of sin, how it is passed through the generations, and the effects of it in the life Ham. Thus, in this paper, I will argue how the sin of Adam and Eve is transmitted to the entire human race, as a sin of nature, since it becomes a habit of mankind. This habit of abusing freedom echoes its ramifications of disorder such as disobedience against God, disorder between Creator and created, disordered passions, and destruction of the roles within a family, as is seen in the impiety of Ham.