Throughout the book the phrase “Who is John Galt?” is used by people. The statement is like the equivalent of “How high is the sky?” or “How deep is the sea?” The question is a hopeless and pathetic phrase of giving up because the answer is unattainable, further stressing the helplessness, laziness, and unwillingness of people then and even can be paralleled to now.
Dagny watches, almost hysterically, as all of the competent, capable people start disappearing. All of the tycoons vanish off the face of the Earth. The world starts going into a recession, because all of the great minds have disappeared. Where have they all gone? is the question Dagny asks herself.
In the course of the book, the readers discover the answer to that question. The great industrialists who are unappreciated have entered Galt’s Gulch, an Atlantis. John Galt, as it turns out, is a real person. He decides that because his best was not wanted, his work was unappreciated, and his inventions stolen to make money for those not deserving it, he would withdraw his talent from the world.
“John Galt is a Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew the fire - until the day when men withdraw their vultures (Rand, 517).”
He encourages all of the other great minds to do the same. His plan was that the world would crumble and that the great industrialists could re-enter, rebuild and do the one thing they should have done a long time ago. They would demand the respect they had long deserved; they would refuse to be called selfish, greedy, and immoral for exploiting the world around them and donating to the world their perseverance, strength, and ingenuity.
“In the name of your magnificent devotion to this earth, leave them, don’t exhaust the greatness of your soul on achieving the triumph of the evil of theirs (Rand, 1069).”
Dagny is then presented with a decision she shouldn’t had to have made in the first place. Whether she should do what she knows in her heart to be true, to leave her railroad, or to stay and fight the world.
In the end, Dagny leaves Taggart Transcontinental, knowing full well that all of her years of devotion will crumble under incompetence, in hopes that she will rebuild it in a world that will appreciate and respect her for doing so.
The main characters in the book are the industrial geniuses and the great minds. They are the protagonists, fighting against a society that doesn’t want them, but desperately needs them. The society is the antagonist. The government is the antagonist. The main characters include Dagny Taggart, John Galt, Hank Rearden, another great man that has been shunned all of his life for his virtues, and Francisco d’Anconia, a genius that is the first to be swayed by John Galt’s logic. Supporting characters include Jim Taggart, Dagny’s brother that is as corrupt as one can be and a sniveling, undeserving gold digger, Eddie Willers, Dagny’s friend and secretary that knows what is right but lacks courage without Dagny’s shadow to guide him, and Cheryl Taggart, another character, who although minor, displays a victim in this scenario. She marries Jim thinking that his is courageous and successful to find out that he was a coward that leeches onto and sucks the marrow out of the accomplishments of the great ones.
This book is about, as I aforementioned, losing to win. It is also a philosophy created by Ayn Rand and displayed with her characters, objectivism. Objectivism is a system where each individual strives to be the best that s/he can be and strives also to profit his/herself. This book is about right and wrong and good and evil and all of that intergalactic-like stuff, but more importantly it is about a man struggling to live his life the way a life ought to be lived and fighting against a society that is perpetual in condemning it. Cheryl once asks Dagny how she can survive through all of her beatings to which Dagny replies “To place nothing - nothing - above the verdict of my own mind . . . the knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight (Rand, 891).” Her life is her first priority, not the life of some bum that is undeserving.
When each great mind enters Galt’s Gulch, they must recite an oath: “I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I shall never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine (Rand, 1069).” That is what the book is about.
For the sake of brevity and non-redundancy, I shall briefly list the conflict/challenge/learning opportunities which I have already incorporated into this paper. Dagny is faced with the choice of betraying her railroad or leaving it into the hands of destroyers, the later is the right choice. She is left with the choice of whether to serve or to rule, to be beaten or to be respected. She finally realizes what she has known to be true all along, that the world is undeserving of her talent and decides that until they are, she shall withdraw that talent and see how the world fares without it. Each of the great men must give up all they have worked for in order to teach the world a lesson and let it crumble, ready to build it again when people learn to respect the individual not for what s/he can contribute to society, but to admire what s/he has accomplished and allowing s/he to live life to their fullest.
Ayn Rand, the author, uses many literary techniques. She uses the setting of New York, the industrial city of the world, as the stage. She describes vividly the emotions and realizations of the characters. The book contains a myriad of symbolism. The title, Atlas Shrugged, comes from when Francisco d’Anconia was attempting to convince Rearden to leave his world. “If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds up the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?”
“I . . . don’t know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?”
“To shrug (Rand, 455).”
Francisco is making Rearden realize that he has been struggling, and succeeding, to survive, and the “looters” (the people who seize achievements not belonging to them) keep making it harder and harder to survive. He realizes that he has to leave this burden until he is respected for carrying it. Francisco also makes the symbolic metaphor comparing John Galt to Prometheus (see Plot Summary).
The whole plight of Dagny is applicable to any capable person living in any age. “We kept man alive, yet we allowed men to despise us and to worship our destroyers. We allowed them to worship incompetence and brutality, the recipients and the dispensers of the unearned (Rand, 619).” Anyone willing to carry the weight of the world for those incapable of doing so can relate to Dagny.
Galt’s Gulch is also a metaphor for Atlantis, the place in mythology where the heroes would go to after they had died on Earth. It would appear and then disappear, never to be found by the searcher, only the deserving.
Another amusing piece of symbolism is used in this book by Ragnar Danneskjöld, another one of the great minds, about Robin Hood. “I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.”
“What man?”
“Robin Hood . . . He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned ones. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors (Rand, 577).”
Money was also the source of a lot of symbolism. For the “looters” money was the “root of all evil.” To the great ones, it was a symbol of productivity, of earnings for labor, achievement, and compensation for hard work, dedication, and ingenuity.
