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.