The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the “sledge-hammer” of a novel, is a novel, even with all its “awkward moments”, is one that I really enjoyed, but more on that later. The story tells of a handmaid by the name of Offred, living in the society known as “Gilead”. Something that really interested me was the name of the society itself, and I knew it had to mean something. Upon researching the name, I discovered that the Hebrew form of Gilead, spelled Gil’ad, has a very interesting break down. In Hebrew, “Gil” means joy and “Ad” means forever or eternity. “The Republic of Gilead” can translate to “The Republic of Eternal Joy”. I find this really interesting and think it is a perfectly ironic name, seeing as everyone in the so-called Republic of Eternal Joy is miserable.

“He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off-key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.”

I particularly like this quote and the message it conveys. It is from Offred looking back on the past when she watched a show that told of how a Nazi death camp guard’s mistress denied that he was evil. It relates to Offred because she started to feel sympathy for the Commander, even though he was part of the reason she was in the miserable state she was, just like the woman who loved the Nazi who oversaw the killing of millions.

As a whole, I enjoyed this novel. It was never really “boring”, and I really liked the story it told. Offred seemed like a very “real” and believable character. Her insight into things was very human; unlike the characters in the other novels we read this year that were like robots. It makes you really think, and it is a novel I would definitely recommend to others.

We

We, plain and simple, is a very peculiar novel. I can't fathom how all the people can have no objection to the overlord-like rule of The Benefactor. For a society so based in logic and math, I can see nothing logical behind being liquefied for breaking even just one rule. And also, even though people in OneState praise their way of life and their ruler, it is never quite explained exactly what he, or it, is. All that is mentioned is his hand and how they are like stone. Is he a man? Is he a robot? It is never quite explained. It intrigues me that a whole society can praise their leader without really knowing what he is.

A passage that I really like is the following:

“The cheerful little crystal in my headboard dings 7:00a.m.; time to get up. To the right and left through the glass walls I see something like my own self, my own room, my own clothes, my own movements, all repeated a thousand times. It cheers you up; you see yourself as part of an immense, powerful, single thing. And such a precise beauty it is: not wasted a gesture, bend, turn”(34).

This passage has stuck in my head sine reading the novel, and remains there to this day. It is such a powerful image, with everyone in OneState all getting up with the same exact movements at the same exact time and putting on the same exact clothes and doing everything exactly the same. It is a really unsettling thing to picture in the mind, and I find it very eerie. It’s as if everyone is a robot. This one paragraph of the novel really struck me and showed me how far OneState had gone in its mathematic and logic based society.

As for the book itself, I wasn’t exactly the biggest fan. Although I find the story itself interesting with the slow degradation of D-503’s train of thought and the events that follow, but at the same time I found it rather dry in some parts. I did however like the way Zamyatin decided to end the story.. It makes you really think about what could happen. Will the resistance in the streets get anywhere? Or would it be crushed by the power of the Benefactor? It is all left up to the reader to figure out.

Anthem

At first when one sits down with the novel Anthem by Ayn Rand, it is most likely that just like myself, they will be helplessly confused. The novel begins with the lines "It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see... And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws." This coupled with the use of the pronoun “we” instead of “I” will confuse at first, but will make sense as one gets farther into the story, and the rules and laws of the world the main character, Equality 7-2521, lives in.

A major part of the story is the social structuring and how everything is run. Society in this novel has reverted to the Stone Age, with the latest technology being that of candles, and along with the technological revert came a complete change in the society’s structure. People no longer have any control over their lives. They cannot choose how much schooling they receive, as in further schooling beyond others in colleges and graduate schools, and they can’t even choose their profession. Equality is a prime example of this. He always wanted to be a scientist in the Home of the Scholars. Instead he was chosen to be a street sweeper, and spends his life simply sweeping streets with a broom, at least until he discovered electricity in the old sewers under the city.

Another big thing is the use of the pronoun “we”. In the world Equality lives in, there is no “I”, only a collective “we”. One would never refer to him self as “I”, only “we”. After Equality discovers “I” In the house on the mountainside after his escape that he recognizes it as the concept that oppressed his society. He describes it in the following way:

“The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.”

He also tells how “we” should only be spoken by self-choice, not because they have to or be burned at the stake in front of the entire city. “I” was forbidden, and it was out of the minds of the people. It bound them together and kept them all equal, but at the same time it kept them from expressing themselves in any way and it kept them from being free and happy.

As a whole, I really liked Anthem. I liked it so much that I didn’t want to stop and finished it in one sitting. I enjoyed the plot and really liked the character of Equality and how he came to be Prometheus at the end of the novel.