Atlas Shrugged as Literature, by Robert James Bidinotto

During an interview in the 1940s, a young reporter asked Ayn Rand about the new novel he heard that she was planning. She must have had a twinkle in her eye when she replied: “It will combine metaphysics, morality, economics, politics, and sex—and it will show the tie between metaphysics and economics.”

“I can’t see how you’ll manage it,” the astonished reporter replied. “But I guess you know what you’re doing.”

She certainly did.

In the form of a suspenseful, romantic, tightly-woven mystery spanning more than a thousand pages, and following scores of characters across a sweeping panorama of American life, Rand simultaneously dramatized and demonstrated every major aspect of a new moral code.

Thematic Structure

Literary scholar Kirsti Minsaas has pointed out that Rand “used the simple formula of a detective story to create a highly complex philosophical novel—a novel where ideas are presented as answers to the mysterious events.”

Atlas Shrugged is structured in three major parts, each of which consists of ten chapters. The titles of the parts and chapters suggest multiple layers of meaning. The three parts, for example, are named in honor of Aristotle’s laws of logic; but as Minsaas observes, Rand also ties these titles to the major themes and events of the story.

Part One is titled “Non-Contradiction,” and appropriately, that part of the novel confronts the reader with a host of baffling contradictions and paradoxes having no apparent logical solutions.

Part Two, titled “Either-Or,” focuses mainly on heroine Dagny Taggart’s struggle to resolve a dilemma: either to continue her battle to save Taggart Transcontinental, or to give it up.

Part Three is titled “A Is A,” symbolizing what Rand referred to as “the Law of Identity”—and here, in the closing section of the book, the answers to all the mysteries are identified and resolved.

Like a good symphony, Atlas Shrugged’s many literary riches become obvious only when we pay close attention, and after many exposures. Its opening pages provide a perfect illustration.

As Eddie Willers walks the shabby streets of Manhattan, he thinks of a huge oak tree of his childhood, a symbol to him of eternal strength. “It will always be there,” he thought—until the night the tree was struck by lightning and split in two. The next day, standing before the fallen tree, Eddie was shocked at what he saw. “The trunk was only an empty shell,” Rand writes; “its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside—just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.”

Moments later, Eddie approaches the reassuring tower of Taggart Transcontinental, his mature symbol of enduring power and strength, and he thinks of the railroad’s proud slogan: “From Ocean to Ocean, forever—thought Eddie Willers, in the manner of a rededication, as he walked through the spotless halls into the heart of the building, into the office of James Taggart, President of Taggart Transcontinental.”

It’s clear that these two passages are meant to serve several purposes. It’s perfectly natural that the decaying city around him might remind Eddie of the decayed oak tree of his childhood. The flashback helps us understand his uneasy mood.

But Rand also intends the description of the tree’s rotted trunk as a metaphor for Taggart Transcontinental. One clue lies in her repetition of the word “heart.” Just as the tree’s “heart had rotted away long ago,” so too had “the heart” of the Taggart Building, in the person of its president. For we soon discover that there isn’t really anything inside James Taggart’s office, either—just a graying, purposeless man who, like the dust inside the tree, was dispersed by the whim of any passing wind. Taggart Transcontinental’s living power had also gone, and what was left couldn’t continue to stand much longer.

Furthermore, the passage also stands as a metaphor for the whole crumbling culture—and the gray, dusty philosophy at its heart. It subtly and symbolically foreshadows the entire plot of the book.

A Tapestry of Symbolism

Such symbolism is everywhere apparent in Atlas Shrugged, lending unusual emotional force to the ordinary specifics of scenes and events. Rand constantly places otherwise insignificant details—names, titles of chapters, events, objects of all sorts—into contexts which impress upon them a host of meanings and create a colorful tapestry of metaphor.

Take the early chapter titled “The Top and the Bottom.” It opens in an expensive rooftop restaurant that’s low and dark, like a cellar. Inside, James Taggart and his powerful friends are conspiring to destroy their competitors. The chapter ends in the basement cafeteria of Taggart Transcontinental, a cheery place of space and bright light. Inside, Eddie Willers is chatting with a nameless railroad worker. Only much later in the novel does the reader realize that the anonymous worker is John Galt, the book’s mysterious hero.

Here, Rand is presenting a metaphor for the moral inversion taking place in this corrupt society—a society that rewards evil and punishes good. The chapter’s title and the events it depicts illustrate what Minsaas describes as a “recurrent idea in Rand’s novels: that in an irrational society, the best are frequently demoted to the bottom, while the worst are to be found at the top.”

Rand’s subtlety extends to dialogue, too, where double, even triple meanings are often embedded in what seems to be casual conversation. For example, there is delightful irony in many of the early references to inventor-hero John Galt; but since they occur long before he appears in the story, most of them won’t be apparent during a first reading.

When Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden discover a revolutionary motor abandoned in the ruins of a factory, they ponder the fate of its unknown inventor. Rearden is certain that the man must be dead. If a mind that brilliant were still alive, he tells Dagny, “the whole world would know his name by now.” A few moments later, he adds, wistfully, “There was the motor for the John Galt Line.”

We can imagine the fun that Rand must have had writing such lines.

Then there’s the verbatim repetition, at the end of the story, of a passage that appears near its beginning: a description of the sounds of Halley’s Fifth Piano Concerto.

It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. . . Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.

That description first introduces us to Dagny Taggart, capturing her idealistic yearnings. But when it’s repeated at the end of the novel, the same description conveys a totally new meaning: not Dagny’s longing for the ideal, but her triumphant achievement of it. Here, it gives the reader the satisfying feeling of a completed circuit—of an emotional benediction on her odyssey, and on our own.

Integrating Ideas and Plot

Beyond such literary devices, Ayn Rand’s most impressive talent was her power to integrate the novel’s philosophical ideas with its plot elements.

One of the finest examples is in the passage describing the first run of a train on the John Galt Line. Here, Rand connects the ironic symbolism of John Galt’s name, the celebration of a great human achievement, the physical sensations of a train speeding across rails built of Rearden Metal, Dagny’s realization about how the human mind gives spiritual meaning to physical matter—and the culmination of the growing romantic attraction between herself and Rearden.

Consider the moment when Dagny enters the engine room of the locomotive. Staring at the engines, she realizes that they are a magnificent embodiment of human rationality. The motors, she thinks, are “a moral code cast in steel.”

When she looks up, she sees Hank Rearden—the steel titan, the engine of the economy, the living embodiment of the rational creativity she worships—and their eyes meet across a space filled with the pounding rhythms of the train’s motors.

To transform ideas of abstract philosophical complexity into a passage of startling physical sensuality is a striking illustration of Rand’s view that there should be no split between mind and body, between ideas and action. She saw human products as physical manifestations of human spirituality—of man’s consciousness in action. And in this remarkable passage, she not only expresses that view philosophically: she illustrates it artistically, as well.

Like her philosophy, Rand’s literary method challenges reigning orthodoxies. Bucking naturalistic conventions, in which novelists try to report the mundane details of real life with tedious fidelity, she instead selected the details in her stories by reference to a single unifying idea. Here, she was simply applying timeless rules of good dramatization.

In his celebrated classic, The Art of Dramatic Writing, literary instructor Lajos Egri points out that in a good story, everything is tightly integrated by some overarching theme or premise. The theme is the point or message that gives meaning to the story and that motivates the characters to act.

In a well-integrated story, no event, character, line of dialogue, or description is tossed in arbitrarily, simply because it sounds clever or interesting. According to Egri, everything must relate to the theme or premise. “In a well-constructed play or story, it is impossible to denote just where premise ends and story or character begins,” he wrote. “Every line, every move your characters make, must further the premise.”

Good drama is built on conflict. But strong conflict requires extremely willful characters pursuing incompatible goals tied to the story’s theme. Their conflicts build powerfully throughout the story, until they’re finally resolved in a climax that demonstrates that theme. “A weak character cannot carry the burden of protracted conflict,” Egri points out. “Go through all great dramas and you will find that the characters in them force the issue in question until they are beaten or reach their goal.”

Ayn Rand shared this view of good fiction writing. In Atlas, her theme is the importance of reason to human life. Her plot, characters, dialogue, and descriptions all reinforce and advance that theme. Conflicts among and even within the characters are based on that theme, too; and the climax—with mindless brutes desperately trying to force John Galt to think for them—finally demonstrates her theme. It proves not only why reason is important to human life, but why personal freedom is essential to reason.

The Art of Stylization

Rand rejected the literary convention that depth and plausibility demand characters who are naturalistic replicas of the kinds of people we meet in everyday life, uttering everyday dialogue and pursuing everyday values. But she also rejected the notion that characters should be symbolic rather than realistic.

“My characters are never symbols, they are merely men in sharper focus than the audience can see with unaided sight,” she wrote. “My characters are persons in whom certain human attributes are focused more sharply and consistently than in average human beings.”

In other words, Rand stylized her characters. She focused selectively on the traits and motives that made each one distinctive, and she eliminated the irrelevant or trivial aspects of their personalities or lives. What determined which traits and motives were essential? Her story’s theme. Rand’s characters are people seen through the filter of a guiding theme.

Take her opening description of Hank Rearden. She wished to portray him as a man of iron will and implacable self-discipline. She conveyed these qualities simply by the details she selected to describe his face while he watched metal being poured from a blast furnace:

The glare cut a moment’s wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice—then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair—then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them: this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five. Ever since he could remember, he had been told that his face was ugly, because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless. It remained expressionless now, as he looked at the metal.

Because Rand eliminated accidental and superficial aspects from the character’s description, we can understand him much better. Random details—such Rearden’s favorite foods, descriptions of the contents of his clothes closet, or flashbacks about his daily routines—would only divert our attention from his essential motives and purposes. Such trivia certainly wouldn’t enhance, flesh out, or deepen our understanding of Rearden. They would only confuse us, making us wonder if these petty details were important to the author, or to Rearden himself. Their inclusion would make the drama diffuse and blur the point of the story.

Another way to appreciate Rand’s approach is to contrast it with that of other writers. The great Russian writer Dostoyevsky was also a master of dramatizing abstract philosophical and psychological themes. In his novel The Possessed, for example, he creates rich, highly detailed, fascinating portraits of vicious, nihilistic characters. However, the sheer volume of such detail can be confusing; it suggests complex and competing motives at work in each character, and oftentimes it isn’t easy to single out the most relevant of these.

By contrast, the more stylized portraits of evil characters in Atlas Shrugged don’t offer as much psychological variety as those in The Possessed—or even as much variety as those Rand provided in her earlier masterpiece, The Fountainhead. That book explored many variations on the theme of psychological dependency. But in Atlas, what Rand loses in diversity and complexity, she gains in depth and clarity. We get to probe the dominant motives of three major villains—Robert Stadler, Lillian Rearden, and James Taggart—down to their very roots. By the end of the novel, we have a much clearer and deeper insight into the minds of the moral traitor, the empty power-seeker, and the envious nihilist.

We also gain a greater grasp of the relationship between philosophical ideas and psychological states. Dostoyevsky shows us that such a link exists; Rand shows us how.

Those Long Speeches. . .

Probably the most criticized portions of Atlas Shrugged are the lengthy philosophical speeches made by her characters—especially Francisco’s seemingly impromptu lecture at a party on the moral meaning of money, and John Galt’s climactic three-hour radio address, in which he summarizes “his” philosophy and reveals what he has been up to. From the standpoint of pacing, these speeches certainly could seem a diversion and a drag; many readers report skimming or skipping them. Personally, I believe that Rand was more successful—strictly in literary terms—in The Fountainhead, where explicit philosophical passages were briefer and did not bring action to a standstill.

But in Rand’s defense, these speeches weren’t tacked onto the story for mere didactic purposes, either. They’re integrated aspects of the plot, intended to propel key elements of the story forward.

Francisco’s “money speech,” for instance, addresses Rearden’s moral confusions and liberates him from guilt about his work. Francisco’s words help Rearden to defend himself later at his trial; they foreshadow the rationale for the strike; and they move Rearden closer to grasping what is wrong with the world and joining the strikers.

John Galt’s speech, though very long, does move the events of the story toward the climax. It forces each character to take a final stand; it brings Dagny to the brink of understanding the nature of her enemies; it ties together all the ideas previously presented in the story; and, most importantly, it leads to Galt’s capture by the dictatorial government, which brings the story to its resolution. If he hadn’t made that speech, the villains wouldn’t even have known of his existence; the destruction of the country would have dragged out more slowly, and—from a literary standpoint—far less dramatically.

Sui Generis

It’s easy to see why Atlas Shrugged is almost impossible to categorize. Ayn Rand pushed the traditional boundaries of the novel form. How do you classify a book that offers an eighty-page discussion of metaphysics, ethics, and political economy—yet simultaneously contains such plot devices as a deadly ray device right out of science fiction, a philosopher-turned-pirate, a beautiful woman who falls in love with the man she’s sworn to kill, and a finalé in which the hero is put onto a torture machine?

No wonder that Rand affectionately referred to Atlas Shrugged as her “stunt novel.” But, as Will Thomas points out elsewhere in this issue, her genius is that somehow, she made the stunt work. By any measure, Atlas Shrugged stands as one of the most remarkable feats of intellectual and artistic integration in the history of literature.