Honors Novel Blog

 ‘We’, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, is a novel that was finished in 1921, that uses the author’s personal experience during the Russian Revolution of 1905, to portray a distant future. This future takes place after the ‘two hundred year’s war’, through which only .2% of the Earth’s population has survived. The book follows D-503 (all those living in this future are known only as numbers), who lives within the walls of the One State. The One State is where all numbers reside, under the Benefactor, who is the ruler of this world, and is re-elected unanimously every year. Everyone in this future is essentially brainwashed, where they comply with any rules or orders given to them by the One State, and anything done to the contrary leads to a public execution. Symbolically, everything is mathematical and precise. From their poetry to their music (“The crystalline chromatic measures of converging and diverging infinite series… What grandeur! What imperishable logic! And how pathetic the capricious music of the ancients, governed by nothing but wild fantasies…” as the main character describes) to their schedules and even their names, numbers and precision are important and necessary. All are even required to don uniforms. Their homes are clear, and privacy is nonexistent. The main theme of this book is of a dystopian future – this dictatorship that these numbers live with is not optional, and outside the green wall that holds them in is supposedly of an uninhabitable, post-apocalyptic world, left over from the ‘two hundred year’s war’. The main character, D-503, is the builder of the Integral – a spaceship intended to bring the kind of thinking of the One State to other distant planets, and to conquer them, as they have Earth.  However, things begin to go awry when D-503 begins to have dreams, and feels out-of-touch with the rest of the numbers. When he realizes he has a soul, he is distraught that he has caught this ‘sickness’. He compares this uncertainty to when he was a boy and first encountered the square root of negative one – “This irrational number had grown into me like something foreign, alien, terrifying. It devoured me – it was impossible to conceive, to render harmless, because it was outside ratio.” It’s once he has acquired this soul, and comes to term with it, that he is clued in to the rebellion at hand to bring down the Benefactor and the One State. After an attempt to seize control of the Integral, those in revolt are found out, and it is required that every number undergo ‘The Operation’. This operation is to destroy your imagination, so, as a result, “You are perfect. You are machinelike. The road to the one hundred per cent happiness is free. Hurry, then, everyone—old and young—hurry to submit to the Great Operation.” Although many attempts are made to avoid this operation, in the end D-503 is forced to undergo it. He wakes up rid of his sickness – free from his imagination – and ready to serve the One State.