Anthem
A short dystopia in which the first-person singular pronoun has been abolished and a young man rediscovers the concept of the individual self after finding an electric light in a forbidden underground tunnel.
Summary
Anthem is set in a future where the word "I" has been abolished. Citizens are designated by numbers, live in collective dormitories, perform assigned labor, and use only the plural "we" even in private thought. Equality 7-2521 is assigned to street sweeping despite his intellectual aptitude. Being too smart is itself a transgression in a society built on uniformity.
He secretly experiments with electricity in a forgotten tunnel beneath the city, rediscovers the incandescent light bulb, and brings it to the World Council believing it will benefit everyone. The Council condemns him: one person making a discovery outside the collective process is more dangerous to them than the discovery itself.
He flees into the Uncharted Forest, where the woman he loves joins him, finds books in an abandoned house, and through them rediscovers the word "I." The novella ends on that moment as a kind of secular revelation.
Rand wrote Anthem in 1937 as a reaction to Soviet collectivism, and it reads most clearly as polemic rather than fiction. The characters are ciphers and the plot is a vehicle for the argument. The argument is not subtle: erasing the first-person pronoun erases subjectivity itself. The prose constraint Rand imposes, writing all of Equality 7-2521's thoughts in the plural "we," creates an odd, alienating effect.
Quotes
"I am. I think. I will."
"What is my joy if I have no one to share it? What is my wisdom, if even the plants are wiser than I?"