Resumo de We - Yevgeny Zamyatin

The term Orwellian has become a part of our collective lexicon as a means of

describing the prototypical horrific vision of the future, or an indication

that such a prediction has been realized. Before Orwell began 1984, however,

and before Huxley put pen to paper to write A Brave New World, Yevgeny

Zamyatin provided the world with We, a bleak prognistication of the world to

come, from beyond the filter of Orwell's anti-Communist idealogy.

In Zamyatin's fantasy, the overarching values of collective assimilation

are realized in the formation of OneState, wherein one finds the individual I

obliterated to become the we of the masses. Everyone wakes as one,

everyone eats as one, and the industrial concept Huxley dubbed "Fordism"

similarly controls the daily regimen of the citizenry. The society itself lives

within a great Green Wall, barring them from contacting what can obviously

be interpreted as a state of nature, a green pastoral that directly contrasts the

pristine and angular landscape of the enclosed cityscape.

Within this world, Zamyatin gives us D-503, the creator of the INTEGRAL, a

spaceship designed to spread the messages of OneState to the

supposed citizens of other planets, to whom D-503 writes. He begins as a

pragmatic mathematician to whom the reason and rationality of OneState

provides validation and edification, and means to write an account of

OneState's perfection to those of other, assumedly inferior people. He writes

mockingly of "the ancients," referreing to Zamyatin's contemporary culture,

antagonizing their freedom and their inability to compute morality within the

rational terminology of arithmatic. His life is governed by the codes of

OneState, to the point of scheduled sexual encounters with his registered

partner, O, who provides more validation through her child-like adoration. He

is happy, as it seems happiness here is dictated by one's inability to think

freely, but merely accept one's existence as part of the whole.

However, the aptly-named I-330 begins dismantling this blissful ignorance,

drawing him into a self-consciousness that breaks open a new feeling of

imaginative freedom and the disease known as a soul. As the narrative

continues, her power becomes greater, as the author cunningly portrays the

disintegration of the hive-mind consciousness from within D-503's own pen,

using the novel's form and content to guide a story laced with personal

anguish and self-realization, though still retain the distance necessary to

present it as an account, separate from the fictional novel. OneState becomes

reality to the reader, more than even the Big Brother society of Orwellian

fantasy, and in the pages that follow, Zamyatin allows a truly human story to

emerge within the confines of his futuristic nightmare.

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