Anthem

The protagonist in Anthem is Equality 7-2521. He lives in a rigidly controlled collective. All lives are highly regimented, 'for the common good.' Everyone has the same kind of a name, like an old-time phone number. (I wondered if somebody might be named Pennsylvania 6-5000. You have to be pretty old to get that allusion. It's from a song popular in the era when Anthem was written.) Equality 7-2521 tells the story in the first person plural. There are no singular pronouns in his language. He refers to himself as we or us and other individuals as they or them. Spoiler Alert - He hopes for a career as a scholar, but when he comes of age he is assigned the job of street sweeper. One day when he is working on a road, he meets a peasant girl named Liberty 5-3000. Thereafter, they acknowledge one another surreptitiously. He comes to think of her as The Golden One.

Equality 7-2521 discovers and explores a hidden tunnel, apparently a subway tunnel from the Unmentionable Times. He spends a lot of time there, writing and doing scientific experiments. He discovers electricity, which is unknown in his society, and with an artifact he finds in the tunnel he reinvents the electric light. He is late returning to the street sweepers' house one day and is questioned about where he has been but he refuses to say. He is lashed, and thrown in a dungeon, but still he refuses to say where he has been. After a month, he escapes and barges into a meeting of the Council of Scholars to reveal his great discovery and, he hopes, to be absolved. The Scholars are appalled that a street sweeper would think that he could know something that they don't know. They decide that he should be burned at the stake. He flees to the Uncharted Forest, where he knows he won't be followed because nobody ever ventures into the Uncharted Forest.

In the forest he feels free and happy for the first time in his life. He laughs and frolics. He throws a stone at a bird, and then cooks it for his supper. The next day he runs into Liberty 5-3000, The Golden One. She had seen him escape into the forest and had followed him. She declares her love for him. Together they travel away from their city, killing birds to eat, living a carefree life in the woods. Eventually they come to a range of great mountains where they find a big house with great glass windows and shelves of books; a house from the Unmentionable Times. There in the books, they discover singular pronouns, and thereafter Equality 7-2521 refers to himself as I or me.

Then he declares his manifesto of the individual and begins planning his revolution.

The prose of Anthem seemed very awkward, because of the use of the plural pronouns. It was obvious immediately when Equality 7-2521 started saying I. After having read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, I was skeptical about Anthem, but it wasn't so bad. Unlike Atlas Shrugged, it is quite short. I never would have read it otherwise.