Anthem Essay Research Paper The book Anthem

Anthem Essay, Research Paper The book Anthem is a book about a world full of mindless people. They let the government control their every action from birth to death. The weirdest thing is how they actually seem to enjoy that lack of control. One young man named Equality 7-2521, however, starts to feel there?s something wrong with his life. Unfortunately, because of his life as a mindless drone, he is virtually unable to express how he feels. The small parts he does understand are crowded with phrases like ?for the good of all? and ?we know we are wrong?. Then he meets Liberty 5-3000. Since men and women only meet once a year for the Time of Mating, they never get married. Equality becomes infatuated by her and secretly stares at her everyday from his job as a street sweeper.

He names her The Golden One, and she names him The Unconquered. One day she talks to him. They both know this is forbidden and will get them into trouble, so they devise a system of simple hand signals to say hello. Meanwhile, Equality is unhappy with the Life Mandate, or job, he was given. Secretly, he develops things like electric light that had been abolished since the Unspeakable Times. One night, he returns late and when he is asked where he went he doesn’t answer. He is thrown into the Palace of Corrective Detention. He?s fiercely beaten but never tells of his secret haven. He escapes from there because there are no locks in the cells since no one has ever thought of escape before. He runs away to the woods and hides. Later Liberty comes looking for him. While there he

reads some books found in an old house and has an epiphany. He discovers words like I, my and mine. He also names himself Promethus and names her Gaea. They live together in an old house in the woods and raise their child to be an individual and never know the word ?we?. Because Anthem was a complex book, it was easy to write a style analysis. One aspect of the book, tone, is the attitude or manner of expression in writing. The tone of this book was both dependent and independent. ?We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE. one indivisible and forever.? (p.19) No quote better than this describes how brainwashed and mindless the people are, for they think only one thought, which is that they as a single person do not matter and can only survive as a

unit of fools. ?I am. I think. I will. My hands. My spirit. My sky…my face…this earth of mine.? This quote describes how Equality has reclaimed his body and mind and is finally capable of thinking for himself. I choose these two quotes because they show how much Equality has changed and learned in the time that he discovers the light. Another aspect of the book was diction, the connotative meaning of word choice. The words I chose were ?we?, ?Council of Vocations? and ?Home of Scholars?. In the story ?we? is used as a communitive pronoun representing everyone, ?Council of Vocations? was like the government, they controlled everyone, and ?Home of the Scholars? was where the most favored were sent for higher learning. Other examples of diction are ?Unmentionable Times? and

?Uncharted Forest?. The Unmentionable Times was how life used to be before the Great Rebirth and the Uncharted Forest was a forbidden place that was left over from the Unmentionable Times. The last example of word choice I found was ?The Great Rebirth?. The Great Rebirth was when the world changed from individualism to thinking of themselves as one single unit. This word choice shows how narrow minded and uncompromising people had become. Detail is literal facts describing things in the novel. An example of this is the quote ?As we undress at night in the dim light of the candles, our brother dare not speak the thought of their minds.? (p. 47) This quote describes how all their lives they have been taught that their own single thoughts don?t matter and shouldn’t be spoken.