"the man had been desperately unhappy then. Now he was proud and smiling becasue his hands were busy doing what they liked to do best, Pail supposed- replacing men like himself with machines. He hooked up the lamp behind the Orange-O sign." (338)

This quote from Player Piano could be the authors feelings on human nature. Finnerty and Paul finally succeeded in overcoming this world built of machines, and here are the people trying to start from scratch in building up the same society. On the surface, it just looks like the man was fixing a machine. However this man had designed a machine to take over his place and it did just that! It took over his role in society. And instead of despising the machines he is drawn to his machine like instincts of making them. This scene in the book is a bit degrading to human nature as a whole. Its message is that human beings are so naive and unintelligent to fully grasp what Paul and Finnerty's grounds were for the uproar. He was acting as a machine, seeing something was broken, and the only processing he took was to rush to it and fix it. This is a common theme in this book, comparing men to machines. It also is comments on how the human race is so reliant on machines as a whole for survival.

Player Piano was not one of my favorites, however I did enjoy the overall message of the book. I think in a lot of instances machines are taking over way to much of what should be left for humans to do. Now-a-days a musician can simply sing a song and then have a computer make the background melody. Music in the present is slowly being stripped away of pure talent. A computer can also make a terrible musicians voice sounds harmonic and distinct. It is so incredibly disappointing to go to a concert and have the musician sound completely different from what he or she's recorded music sounds like.
I enjoyed the ending to Player Piano as well. Just because one can not win every battle does not mean it is not worth putting up a fight. I thought it was brilliant that in the end Lasher told them all he knew they would not win the "battle". In a book about a society that is so structured, the message at the ending of the book was winning a battle in itself. At least they finally had a cause for something, used their own brain power instead of the machine.

player piano

Throughout the entire book of Player Piano, I had been thinking about the title and it was significant to the work as a whole. In the first few chapters there is a player piano in the bar that Paul goes to with Finnerty. The word choice in this particular section is interesting because the author states that its a player piano, not just a regular piano. "Finnerty sat at the player piano, savagely improvising on the brassy, dissonant antique". (105) An original piano is a "machine", however this machine would be merely a pretty piece of wood if there were not a talented musician to play it. However a player piano is a machine that plays itself, stripping away any of the talent and human aspect from the music. Vonnegut uses the player piano as a symbol of machines taking over too much of what should remain human in society.

Anthem Quote

“Then we knew. We were in the Uncharted Forest. We had not thought of coming here, but our legs had carried our wisdom, and our legs had brought us to the Uncharted Forest against our will.”

As I had written before, the Uncharted Forest is one of my favorite parts of this book. It symbolizes so much within itself. I chose this particular wrote because it reminded me of another quote very similar to it. In Fahrenheit 451, Montag says something very similar in nature when he kills Beatty. He blames his hands for his actions, instead of taking responsibility for his them. Equality is doing the same thing. This point in the book is Equality’s weakest moment. Throughout the entire book, when he was in the subway educating himself he knew and accepted that it was no one besides himself doing what he was doing. Just pages after his weak moment he realizes what he is doing, the book’s tone took an entirely new direction. It went from uncertain to confident and assured.

I also think the word choice for the “Uncharted” forest. Another word for uncharted is unknown or unfamiliar. This is a much better word choice then forbidden. It is ironic because forbidden is just a given, so instead of being called forbidden it was called uncharted.

The Benefactor was the one character in the story of We that interested me the most. He had so much power in the society, so much control. It is as if whenever the character of the Benefactor speaks, the author speaks though him. The Benefactor was the character of wisdom in the book, the voice of reason. Although what he had to say to D-503 at the end of the book about I- 330 was not what he wanted to hear, it was still nevertheless the truth. D-503 was just a piece of the puzzle that I-330 needed to complete her big picture. He didn’t actually care about him or his feelings, and I admire how the Benefactor tells D-503 with no holding back.

However the Benefactor had offensive things to say about Christian beliefs, and these offensive things were justified because it was coming from such a strong powerful character. It is interesting to me that Zamyation built the character of the Benefactor using biblical references, but at the end of the book completely bashes Christian beliefs. For example the Benefactors hands were always described as "huge cast iron hands", which is the same way God was described in many places in the bible. When talking about the Benefactor even if it was a pronoun such as him, it was always capitalized. It is also the same way in the bible.


“Suppose they blindfolded you and force you to walk by feeling your way along, stumbling and knowing that right there, inches away, was the edge. Just one step, and all that’s left of you is a piece of flattened dead meat. Isnt that just what I am doing?” Pg 170

I like this quote because I think every once in while we all feel the way the main character is feeling at this point. Relating to the story, the main character is taking some blind risk taking that is making him constantly feel on the edge. The word choice in the second sentence makes the entire statement more powerful “a piece of flattened dead meat.” As if humans who are identified as numbers isn’t already dehumanizing, those same humans are then referred to pieces of dead meat. This quote could also easily be related to our world. The “they” in the quote could be anyone who pressures another person to do something. Although people say they don’t want others to have control and power over them, there are yet still many instances that it happens. What could drive a fourteen year old boy to come to school one day and shoot his classmates and teachers? That boy was feeling defenseless, blindfolded, like he was about to fall off of the edge. He was blindfolded for so long that the anger was uncontrollable. Although the boy and D-503 are in completely different worlds, they still felt that lost feeling described in the quote above. D-503 went against his society, which in his world is seen as horrific as the situation with the boy.



The book We introduced me to a lot of firsts. It was the first book that I read that had a character such as the Benefactor in it. The closest character in a story that I have read that I could compare the Benefactor with is God in the bible, which is probably what the author wanted. It is also the first time I read a book and did not see the ending coming. After reading Fahrenheit, the reader could assume that eventually they would go back to the city and try to recreate a better society much like one of the far past. However We did not leave the reader with much to dwell on. Those feeling of hope were quashed when I realized that they took D-503’s imagination. The ending is what ruined the book of We for me. I’m not saying I want every ending of a book that I read to end with butterflies and rainbows, but I at least want to close the book after reading the last page with every problem resolved and assume that there is hope for the society I have just read about. I also did not like that a lot of D-503’s thoughts were always cut off by “…”s. I realize that it was part of the syntax of the book and was put there for a purpose, but it made the read extremely choppy and scattered.

The Anthem was an attention getting book right from the start. The main character was inspiring, his every action was very honorable. When reading it Anthem along with the book We, I would look forward to the twenty pages of Anthem and dread the ten pages of We. Why? The little things about the book is what made it one of our best ones this year. I liked how the paragraphs were separated by spaces. It made the read go quickly, and kept much of what Rand wanted to convey to the reader organized. I love reading about different cultures. And although this is a fictional society, the different ways of the society was interesting to read about. How the men would get jobs, the smarter ones put down and the less intelligent ones ruling the society? How ironic! Also the fact that the apple of Equality’s eye was such a far reach from him, and for what reason? Reasons of the society. It was interesting that the entire book was written using the world “we” when in fact it was an individual the entire time. It was as if there were little puzzles of the book that got resolved at the end. Resolution. That is my favorite part of the book. Any question, any confused thought was resolved at the end. Equality realized what the forbidden word was, he had a woman to start a life with and a home to keep his new family safe. That sense of hope for the main character at the end of the book is what made Anthem an excellent book.

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.