We (I) Blog!!!

A Hairy Situation

Yet again continuing our journey through the dark and frightening land of dystopias, this time our reading takes us to Onestate, in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. In the society of Onestate, privacy does not exist. The buildings are constructed of glass cubes, stacked one on top of the other. The streets are lined with devices to hear every conversation. Every member of Onestate has a shaved head, in an attempt to create a shapeless blob of indifferent human bodies. In this regimented decree, however, a small flaw exists in the hairiness of our protagonist, D-503(henceforth D)’s hands. D has known all along that something was different with him. He was always taller than everyone else, and had these huge, ape-hands. Even I-330 (resistance member and our hero’s “woman”) notices them and makes a peculiar comment involving D having a special blood. These hands are what sets him apart, but it is not until later that he learns that this is a good thing. Adding to this hairy confusion, D soon learns that a whole “town” with hundreds of hairy people live right outside the walls of Onestate. In one sense, the hair seems to represent rebellion. It is different than what Onestate wants, so any hairy person is an enemy of Onestate. This case is strengthened by the fact that D hates his hands. He is a conformed member of the society (for now), and he knows how wrong and unnatural they are. They are the link between him and the people outside of the city, who live free from the tyranny of Onestate, the representation of rebellion becoming freedom. In this sense, one could also discern that the hair represents enlightenment. D is different than the others in more ways than just his hands. He has the ability to think higher and more critically, and this innate knowledge is represented by his difference (his hairy hands). The ones outside the city know that what it is doing is wrong. This is their enlightenment, which will eventually become D’s. This hairiness can also be looked at as primal man reaching through to D. Onestate is violating what makes man man. By giving D these hands, the primal man within him is trying to tell him how wrong this society is, and coincidentally, through those same hands, all of D’s rebellious acts are committed. Perhaps if D never had hairy hands, he would have lived his life as another faceless, hairless blob of Onestate.

Mayday!

D is obsess with I-330. She is all he can think about. One quote in the novel seem to sum up how he feel about this (and everything else going on) quite nicely.
“What is the matter with me? I’ve lost the rudder. The motor is roaring for all it’s worth, the aero is trembling and racing along, but there’s no rudder--and I don’t know where it’s headed: downward to crash into the earth any second, or upward… to the sun, to fire…”
The absence of the rudder is clearly D feeling as if he is not in control of his life. Be it I, O, R, or any other letter of the alphabet, everyone else seems to be directing what he is doing, and his mind is in shambles (which accounts for the difficulty in reading). Not only is he not in control, but he doesn’t even know where he’s going. He doesn’t know what the goals of I are, how O really feels, or anything else. I could simply be tricking him into crashing his plane to his death. Bringing this point up, he has a pretty good idea of where this whole situation is leading him. Either crashing into the earth, or burning in the sun. Both of these happen to result in death. Is it a coincidence then that later on, D does find himself falling down into the Earth, into I’s secret base, claiming that when he started falling he died?

Um, what just happened?

I enjoyed the story of We. I would have enjoyed it more if I knew what was going on. I understand that the author wanted us to feel like D was feeling, confused, shambled, dazed. The way he went about doing this makes me consider the book with a somewhat poetic aspect to it. So with the poetic aspect, we get the emotion that D is feeling, but we don’t know why he’s feeling that way. I also liked the cliffhanger ending, the idea that, although D had been neutralized, the Green Wall had fallen. Onestate is teetering, and it’s up to the reader to decide what happens. But that’s just me, who likes cliffhangers. Another thing that made this book a little harder to swallow was it directly following the such a short and easy to read book as Anthem. An aspect of the book I liked was the glass of Onestate. The pure clarity, total lack of privacy, and indestructibility of it represent Onestate at its highest level. It was an interesting book, and I hope to get a better insight when I reread it.