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.