Atlas Shrugged

“Who is John Galt?”

The opening line is a rhetorical question used within the story world as an expression of surrender, first coined by the workers of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. The phrase establishes the hopeless atmosphere of the society outside of Galt’s Gulch and foreshadows the reveal of John Galt’s identity. It is repeated throughout the novel, allowing the characters’ various responses and reactions to illuminate differing and changing characteristics.

“The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color fading from an old masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire but a dying one which it is too late to stop.”

Rand paints a vivid image of the cityscape that clearly conveys an atmosphere of decaying grandeur and encroaching entropy. Once-grand structures are falling into ruin, mirroring the economy’s downward spiral into socialism, unproductivity, and stagnation. The simile compares the city to a fading “masterpiece,” creating a melancholic and nostalgic mood, suggesting that circumstances are worse for the characters in the present time than they were for prior generations. The closing simile compares the light to a “dying” fire, foreshadowing the upcoming extinguishing of the fires of industry and the lights of New York.