The Forest in the story of The Anthem is a symbol in the book that is important to the story but can also be related to real life. In the story, the forest may have technically been forbidden, but no one needed to say that because who would have wanted to leave their great society anyway? What is ironic is that there was no physical wall around the city that separated the people from the forest, the people in the town put up a mental wall around the city, to keep themselves inside and “safe”. The only information that they knew about the forests was that all that left never came back. They never thought about that fact that the people that left may have not wanted to come back. The forest was the unknown, and anything unknown can be scary. When I think about the forest in Anthem, it reminds me of the men that were sent into space to reach the moon. Space was the unknown and they set off to search it anyway. When equality finally found himself, the individual inside, the mental wall around the forest collapsed and he was finally able to discover what the past and how he wanted to make it the present.