We

In Zamyatin’s We, there is a lot going on, and there is a lot that is different and confusing for us because the style of Zamyatin’s writing. The symbol I found most prominent was the glass walls. The city is made up of glass walls, the cutting edges are at every corner. They not only allowed almost no privacy, but they were also perfect because they were straight, square, nothing hanging off them. In this society where everything is in perfect squares and everything is proportional the walls seem to be just an extension of that perfection. Another thing about the walls is the fact that you can look down and see other people, such as the morning D-503 woke up and looked down to see everybody else doing EXACTLY the same things as him. I can’t imagine how creepy that would be to be looking through my glass wall and seeing almost a mirror effect. There is another aspect of the walls, and that is the blinds. The blinds allow the privacy needed for the pink ticket hour. The blinds allow him to have his own thoughts, in his dark room.

My favorite passage was, “You are perfect, you are the equal of the machine, the path to 100 percent happiness is free. Hurry, then, all of you, young and old, hurry to undergo the Great Operation. Hurry to the auditoriums where the Great Operation is performed. Long live the Great Operation! Long live OneState! Long live the Benefactor!” because it’s such a cheerful message from the Benefactor, but it has to do with something that is not cheerful at all. They are advertising the operation that removes imagination, which is hard to IMAGINE living without. That means that nothing new can be created, nothing maybe a little irrational, because that would involve an imagination. I don’t like the fact that the state has so much control over its people, because these messages, these advertisements probably persuaded many people to go get the operation done.

I didn’t enjoy this book. I liked the fact that I could understand some of it because I like math so much, but at other times, when D is speaking, I get confused, and I get angry because his thinking is so unlike my own. He has such different ways of looking at things, and I don’t understand it because although I am used to thinking mathematically because I do it all the time, I’ve never done it with the intensity he does it in. He is just weird in my opinion. If the book was written a different way, I might have liked it better, but it probably wouldn’t be the same because it wouldn’t give the characters as much depth as they had.

The Handmaid's Tale

As I went back and skimmed the Handmaid's Tale looking for quotes and things to use for my blog, I noticed how much Margaret Atwood uses flowers as symbols. Mainly she uses the flowers as symbols for women in general, and at times especially handmaids. At one point in the beginning of the book Atwood is describing the house, and she says, “above the front door, is a fanlight of colored glass: flowers, red and blue” (9). I took this to symbolize the two main women of the household; Serena Joy (blue), and Offred (red). As I thought about the colors and the women being flowers, I thought about the other women of the household: the Marthas. The Marthas wear green, so I took this to symbolize the stems of the flower, which do all the work, and make the energy for the rest of the plant. So the Marthas are the stems and Serena Joy and Offred are the flowers. In another part of the book, the flowers are described as chalices, and at first, we talked in class about how the chalice was just pertaining to Offred, but as I thought about it further, I realized that it’s both Offred and Serena Joy. They’re both empty chalices, but the difference is that Serena Joy isn’t disposable. At one point in the book it says that when the flowers get old and the petals wither, it’s time to dispose of them, and it’s the same with Offred, once she’s used and starts to get old, it’s time to get rid of her. That’s ironic because that’s just like the society we live in. We all turn old things in to get the new thing, the new toy, because “old” is out. Another use of flowers as symbols is when Atwood uses them to tell about the struggle for the women to be heard. Offred tells us, “There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently” (153). This means that the women are silenced, and they can’t speak up, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to be heard in some way, to try to bring the truth into the light. The flowers are very important in this novel. These are just a few of the many examples I found.

My favorite passage is, “She was snipping off the seedpods with a pair of shears…the swelling genitalia of the flowers…the fruiting body…Saint Serena, on her knees, doing penance” (153). I really liked this passage because of the image I get. I don’t just see Serena Joy tending her garden, I see her bitterly chopping off the seedpods, and I see her almost chopping at the handmaid’s uterus, trying to cut that out, make them not be able to reproduce. This was such an interesting passage to me because of the symbolism and innuendoes that are hidden beneath the surface.

I liked this book the best out of all the dystopias we read because I understood the characters and the plot made me want to read it. This was a book I didn’t want to put down (except for some of the graphic parts), and I wanted to know more about the society. I was clamoring for more at the end, unlike in Anthem and We. In both of those I was bored. With Anthem I didn’t think there was a great plot, and with We I couldn’t relate to the characters at all. At first I was critical of Handmaid’s Tale, but it may now be one of my favorite books I’ve read in school.

Anthem

The passage that I really liked in Rand’s Anthem was, “But our hand which followed the track, as we crawled, clung to the iron as if it would not leave it, as if the skin of our hand were thirsty and begging of the metal some secret fluid beating in its coldness” (Rand 28). As they were climbing down, they clung to the iron not only out of fear of the unknown, but also because they wanted to learn. The words begging and thirsty are in there, meaning they wanted to find something so badly, they wanted something to be down there, they couldn’t bear it if there wasn’t. Down into the tunnel, they wanted something other than the life they’d known, they wanted there to be more. I really liked this passage because of the word choice, and what it added to the meaning of the work as a whole.

A very important symbol is the forest. Much like in Harry Potter it is somewhat of a “forbidden forest”. As far as “they” were concerned, no one had ever gone into the forest following the “unmentionable times”. It is similar to the tunnel where Equality 7-2521 found the light bulb, it is one of the places where they can go to escape the world they live in. The forest is new knowledge for them, it is a place that they haven’t explored before, and it’s in the forest, outside of the society they used to live in, where they become who they were truly meant to be. It is in the forest they break ties with “we”, it is just them, just “I”. They even get names. Equality 7-2521 becomes Prometheus, who is the Greek God of light, and Liberty 5-3000 becomes Gaea, the God of Earth. The forest allows them to escape the world they were suffocated by.

I liked this book enough, I didn’t exactly love it. My favorite was definitely Handmaid’s Tale. I liked this book because there was a love story, and there were also characters I can understand.