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by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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Summer said: " The book We, written by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a portrayal of a “Utopia.” This Utopia appears after about thirty years of bombing, and all the roads are destroyed. Instead of roads there is a Wall, which is made of a giant hedge, creating the “United St The book We, written by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a portrayal of a “Utopia.” This Utopia appears after about thirty years of bombing, and all the roads are destroyed. Instead of roads there is a Wall, which is made of a giant hedge, creating the “United State,” in which the main character, D-503 finds himself trapped.

Zamyatin’s Utopia can only function by restricting everyone, controlling their thoughts, feelings, and scheduling their lives down to the minute. This lessens the amount of factions within their society. According to the Federalist papers there are only two ways of destroying factions, “the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interest.” If you were able to limit everyone’s liberties, you would have no factions, you would have no violence, and you would be able to control everyone. This was the basis of Zamyatin’s book. The United State believes that when a person is given freedom they are immediately a criminal, “if human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any crime. That is clear. The way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of freedom.” Pg-34 The main character D-503 has been given no liberties his whole life, he is not a singular person, he is the projection of the Untied State inside one person. He, throughout the book is shown rebellion groups of citizens and he constantly runs back to the state because it is all he has known.

D-503 begins his slow decent from feeling like a part of his society, he starts feeling disconnected, like a finger cut off from a hand. Yet he can’t speak about it for fear of being killed, in this Utopian free thinkers are killed. Yet another way faction are minimized, along with not giving people actual names but letters and numbers, not allowing them the feeling uniqueness. This book of a utopian society has taken a look at the natural extremes of creating a utopia. The extreme is a simple fact, take away peoples liberties is taking away their air. You can’t suppress people unless you create soulless robots. Souls are what make humans, human. It gives us uniqueness, imagination, ideas, skills. If you suppress people for long enough, tell them it’s wrong to dream, it’s wrong to feel, it doesn’t mean they won’t. They just simply will do it under ground. Factions will still occur, only they wouldn’t be public. This book shows this as a fact. ...more "

Dec 16, 2010 01:52PM · see review