1069 Pages (Monica Rodriguez)

            Upon finally reaching page 1069 I have mixed feelings about the novel and how it unfolded.  While I did enjoy the enticing writing of Ayn Rand and the way in which she had the characters, that she pushed us into rooting for, prevail in cunning and genius ways I did not enjoy how repetitive the book quickly became.

The point of the book was clearly given to us right from the beginning with James’ constant muttering of “I cant help it” and “no one can blame us” and the stranger’s use of the question “Who is John Galt?” These phrases depict the looters as men who do not take responsibility for things that go wrong, stating that because they are not blame or because there no answer to their question they should not try and fix a problem that they face. This is a trait that Rand later proves to be unproductive when she expresses the way in which Taggart Transcendental was failing under James’ leadership and how the government falls under the leadership of men like him. The phrases are then constantly used throughout the book marking each character that uses them as a looter and one of the proverbial “bad guys”. When I first began reading the novel I found Rand’s use of theses phrases to be genius because it effectively made the reader hold disdain for those who used it. When I reached later parts of the book and she was still using those phrases I started to tire of the repetitiveness of the book.

Then I reached Galt’s speech. This 50 page speech is a prime example of my most pressing issue with this novel. Galt spent the time stating over and over again the exact same point; men are not meant to live by taking the work of others. It is fine point, one that Rand has even persuaded me to agree with, for the most part, but it did not need to be stated in so many different ways and is not so complicated that it needs 50 pages to be made clear. The speech, in its repetitive nature, was sort of like a smaller version of the entire book. It had some wonderful points but was a to long and repetitive considering how those points where made in the first five pages.

What is ironic is that my favorite thing about this book was the way in which small events represent the economy’s declined throughout the entire novel. It was near the beginning that Rand first expressed one of these metaphors with the story of the factory. This factory had seen many owners and under its final owners a system was created in which workers would be paid based on their demonstrated need, not on their actual work. Naturally this system failed terribly because the workers had absolutely no motivation to work hard when they would not get anything out of it. This factory and its quick demise was the clearest bit of foreshadowing that Rand gave us. It was a metaphor for the whole of the country and the path that it was taking, a warning that was later realized when the lights of New York shut down much like the lights of the factory had been shut down years before. We were later gifted with another metaphor during the confrontation between Dr. Stadler and the Friends of the People. During the confrontation Stadler could not understand how the Friends of the People could have taken over Project X, something he had created and as such was his “property”. However, mush like Stadler’s fellow looters seized Rearden’s intellectual property, The Friends of the people did seize his weapon and their seizing of his property later led to the complete destruction of “a circle with a radius of a hundred miles”, much like the looter’s seizing the rights to Rearden Steel led to the country’s economy collapsing. These metaphors were my absolute favorite things about the book because they cleverly expressed in a small way the points that Rand was making with her drawn out story.

In addition to the brilliant metaphors, I also greatly enjoyed the moments of triumph that I discussed in my last two blog posts. Rand, in her talent for writing, was able to make me feel serious hatred for many of the looters and their attempts to control the producers. During moments like Rearden’s trail and Galt’s speech (well the beginning of it) I was absolutely in love with the book because the “heroes” of the novel were overcoming the corruption of the looters with clever words during events that the looters had orchestrated. Those events proved the genius of the characters that I had grown to admire and how they were the once with the true moral code.

With my book fully annotated and this final blog post nearly finished I am glad that I read this novel. Although there were times that the repetition frustrated me to no end, there were also many moments when the cleverness of some of the characters made smile and laugh. I will not miss having to look at the dauntingly large novel on my desk every Sunday, but, other then that, I finish this book with happy memories of metaphors, triumphs and rants with my friends about the once seemingly endless Atlas Shrugged.