Atlas Shrugged: Difference between revisions

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The book Atlas Shrugged begins following Eddie Willers as he walks to the Taggart Terminal.  He passes a homeless man who remarks, “Who is John Galt?”  Shuddering Eddie walks off.  The Taggart Terminal is a high ceiling train terminal with a large statue of Taggart Transcontinental’s founder, Nathaniel Taggart.  Eddie promptly gets in an argument with James Taggart, who is the President of Taggart Transcontinental, over a dispute involving an order of steel from Orren Boyle, who is president of Associated Steel because it is over 6 months late.  Jim insists that Orren is his friend, and that he will come through.
 
Our heroine, Dagny Taggart, who is Operating Vice-President of Taggart Transcontinental, later gets in from her trip to inspect the Rio Norte Line, which is in worse shape then she expected.
She is Jim’s sister, and both of them are direct descendants of Nathaniel.  James, or Jim, as he is most often referred to as, doesn’t really know how to run a railroad, but he does have ‘friends’.
When Dagny returns she tells Jim she canceled the order of steel from Orren Boyle.  She instead ordered Rearden Metal, invented by Hank Rearden of Rearden Steel, which is has three times the strength of steel but only a fraction of the weight, but it has never been used for anything.
Jim is outraged at Dagny because Orren is his friend.
When the railroad association forces a certain company in Colorado to go out of business, Dagny quickly strives to build rail out to Colorado to prevent the big industries in Colorado from being without transportation to move their goods.  Because Jim doesn’t want to have the bad publicity of making a line of rail out of Rearden Steel, Dagny temporarily forms another company to construct the John Galt Line.
After completing the Line, she and Hank Rearden take the first ride over the whole line.  The Line is important because Colorado’s industry has been exploding lately.  When they arrive in Colorado they spend the night at Ellis Wyatt’s house, an oil tycoon whose brilliant methods promise to make oil flow continuously.  That night they have sex for the first time, despite the fact that Hank is married.
They go on a ‘vacation’ together, staying in hotels under false names, all the while looking at old factories, looking for ideas or things that can be reused.  At the remains of the Twentieth Century Motor Company they find the remains of a self-sustaining motor that drew static electricity from the air.
Dagny traces the history of the ownership of the Twentieth Century Motor Company to find the man who invented the motor.  Long after Hank returned home, her search led her to a dinner, where the cook was Hugh Akston, a philosopher taught at the renown Patrick Henry University.  He gives her some insight and a cigarette bearing the sign of the dollar.
All over the world at this time people are advocating the practice of helping others, and that there is no mind.  They say that man’s biggest delusion is that he thinks that he thinks, whereas in reality, no one is capable of thinking.  A book is published called “Why do you think you think?”  They do things because of a ‘feeling’, not because of logic.  They criticize people like Hang and Dagny because they think logically to make money and they want to keep what they earn instead of giving it to other people just because ‘they need it.’  They all use the phrase “Who is John Galt?” in conversation, referring to a question that can’t be answered.
She hires a man, Quentin Daniels of the Utah Institute of Technology, to work on the remnants of the motor and try to make it work, if he succeeds, it would mean a major revolution in the world of power production.
Jim marries a girl he finds in a dollar store, and at the wedding party Hank and Dagny both attend, and a third intellectual also attends.  Francisco d’Anconia, heir and president of d’Anconia Copper and also a childhood friend of Dagny’s who was in fact the first person to have sex with her, gives a speech countering the statement that money is evil, saying that money is noble because it represents the efforts and time of whoever earned it, and that buying something is actually trading these efforts with the efforts of someone else.
All over the country the greatest industrialists have been quitting, just getting up and leaving their businesses and disappearing.  Among these is Ellis Wyatt, who set fire to his oil fields, due to a directive that resulted in the strangling of Colorado’s industrial success passed by Wesley Mouch, the new economic coordinator of the country, has issued a series of directives a fire that is never quenched throughout the entire novel.  Dagny is convinced that there is a destroyer out there, someone who has something to say to these industrialists that causes them to just get up and leave, without a trace.
Then Wesley Mooch issues Directive 10-289, which states that no one can change his or her job, no new products can be invented, no new books can be written, everyone has to spend the same amount of money, and to make the same amount of money as the did in the benchmark year.
Dagny attempts to quit by going to a summer home that belongs to her family.  Finding it impossible to separate herself from the railroad, she returns only to find a letter from Quentin Daniels saying that he would no longer take her money, and that he would continue to work on the motor alone.  She tells him not to do anything until she gets there, and she quickly gets on a train heading east to Utah.
On the train she meets a tramp

Revision as of 02:38, 3 January 2005