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Summary Of Individuality In Anthem By Ayn Rand

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Is a man better off conforming with evil or escaping from chains that hold him from being an individual? In the novel, Anthem, written by Ayn Rand, the narrator lives in a dystopian population where people must refer to themselves in first person as the great “WE”, because individuality is the prominent sin. The story is written as journal entries that ultimately showed the narrator’s change of emotion, changing his ordinary course of being collective. The narrator starts out the story by saying, “It is a sin to write this” (17). Throughout the story, Anthem, the protagonist, Equality 7-2521, changes his thoughts about his society, and the distinction of his morals. Equality 7-2521 discovers things from the “Unmentionable Times”, (times of the past before everything was forcefully collective in the story’s setting) that allow him to realize why his thoughts about happiness were indeed true. Equality 7-2521’s eventual assessment of his sin is correct because he achieves the realization that individuality is essential to the continuation of mankind, and cannot simply be removed from a person’s life.
In the beginning, Equality 7-2521 describes his actions, how they differed tremendously from the people in his society, and how they encouraged him to believe that he was cursed. He explains that he had always been a sinner, and had always defied the rules of the Council of Vocations, the party who distinguished laws. Equality, having such a strong desire to learn more than what

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