Anthem By Ayn Rand: Literary Analysis

There's many examples as to how the Holocaust can relate to the dystopian book Anthem by Ayn Rand that are shown throughout the book; however they also have many differences. The author writes about many events that can clearly be related to the book The Night by Elie Wiesel about the Holocaust that can be supported with direct quotes. A dystopia is “a community or society that is undesirable or frightening. It is translated as "not-good place" and is an antonym of utopia” accourding to https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dystopia. In other words, a dystopia is a society where people live often fearful lives and are dehumanized and classified just like the jews were during the Holocaust. In many dystopian books power is maintained through

They didn’t use electricity and the citizens weren’t given proper names when they were born instead they were given names like Liberty-3500 or Equality-7-2521. In the society they are not allowed to use the word “I” so everyone refers to themselves as a collective, or as “we”. This is because the society wants to avoid individual rights. At the beginning of the book the characters were slightly introduced with their names and their jobs. The main character, Equality-7-2521, was given the job of a street sweeper even though he was smart enough to go into the school of scholars. The society doesn’t have an actual government, but they have Councils who handle situations and assigning jobs to each citizen. During the book, Equality and some of his friends found an underground tunnel where they also found a light which they fixed. When they fixed it they brought it to the Council were the members became terrified of the light because it came from the “Unmentionable Times”, which were times that we live in now. Equality was sent to a detention facility where he escaped and ran away into the forest. In the forest he found a house from our times where he also met his friend Liberty and they lived there. In the house they found and learned about many things from our time and how much better it was. Liberty was a female who later had a child

This is similar to the ways the Jews lived in the concentration camps. A quote from the book that can support this is on page 69 where it said “The bell announced that we were dismissed.” Both of these examples show how the books are similar and how both societies had a strict way of living with specific times for everything. Another way these two books are similar is in the ways they citizen are treated by their “leaders”. In Anthem if a citizen broke one of their strict rules, they would be punished to either the correctional facility or by death. On page 16 a quick section of texts says “We have seen one of such men burned alive in the square of the City.” and then again later on in the page “They had torn out the tongue of the Transgressor, so that they could speak no longer.” This can easily be compared to events that Elie Wiesel wrote about in Night. For example on page 64 where it briefly says “The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs. In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.” In both books the citizens are tortured and killed; however they are in different ways, they are still treated poorly. One more example that shows how similar these books are is how citizens are assigned what jobs they must do, and how they are given no choice in anything in