Anthem

About the book

Equality 7-2521 lives under rules that assign work, regulate knowledge, and condemn independent preference. His curiosity draws him towards a hidden place where he can investigate the remnants of an earlier world and pursue discoveries outside collective permission. The narrative's unusual first-person plural makes the governing ideology present in the very words through which he tries to understand himself. Attachment to another person introduces a further experience that the accepted vocabulary cannot easily accommodate. Rand develops the short novel as a stark philosophical fable, contrasting conformity with the claims of individual thought and achievement. Its concentrated design makes the struggle over language central to the struggle over value, asking what becomes possible when a person can name an experience the surrounding order insists should not exist.

• Individuality
• Knowledge and authority
• Language and identity

Why read it

For a compact philosophical fable that makes the form of its narrator's language part of the conflict over independent thought.

Dystopian novella · English text