Atlas Shrugged Analysis

Music and sound are running themes throughout the novel. It's no mistake that music is tied to the strike and to Galt's value system. Meanwhile, sound, unappealing, dangerous, and even deadly, is l...

We really could have just put "the world" for the setting, or at the very least America. This is a sweeping book with a worldwide scope. We have characters traveling all over the continental United...

The narrator here is wholly omniscient, meaning that the narrator can let us in on any character's inner thoughts or back story at will. But we rarely hear just the narrator's voice, independent of...

That's a long list, but this book is crazy long, so it's not surprising that it incorporates a lot of different genres. We'll break it down into bite-sized pieces.First up, dystopian literature. A...

For the most part, the tone of Atlas Shrugged is straightforward and somewhat unemotional. It is often weirdly detached in places, which helps contribute to the book's vaguely mysterious, ominous a...

That probably seems like a random list, but all these styles are in fact interconnected. Just stick with us for a bit. This is a big book in more ways than one (not just in that it makes a great do...

Upon hearing this title, your first reaction may be, "huh?" Who is Atlas? Why is he shrugging? Well, first off, Atlas refers to a Greek myth. In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan. The Titans had a...

The ending of the book is kind of a downer and a half, which feels like a bit of a rip-off considering that we've stuck around for thousands of pages. We do get a positive, heroes-saving-the-day mo...

This is not an easy book. It's insanely long, dense, complicated, half the time you don't know what's going on (it is a mystery, but still), there seem to be hundreds of characters (was Ayn Rand ch...

From the beginning until Hank and Dagny return from WisconsinDuring this stage we meet most of our major characters, and the main quests are put into motion: to build the John Galt Line to save Col...

From the introduction of Eddie and his sense of doom through the period where the John Galt Line is builtIn this stage we learn that something is very wrong, although what that is remains mysteriou...

Volume 1: from the introduction of our major players (Dagny and Hank) to the dramatic exit of Ellis Wyatt.Volume 2 Colorado fails, things get worse, and Dagny's fate is uncertain after a dramatic p...

Ayn Rand was a staunch anti-communist, largely because of her bad experiences in Soviet Russia. In America, she became involved in anti-communist politics. She testified as a "friendly witness" at...

There is a lot of sex in this book, though for the most part it's not overly explicit. There's nothing pornographic here; sex is a part of these people's lives and it's mentioned accordingly throug...

This book has a surprisingly small number of shout-outs, especially given how long, philosophical, and intellectual it is. But the book is set in an alternate universe, so the number of "real world...