Anthem

" 'We love you.' But then they frowned and shook their head and looked at us helplessly. 'No,' They whispered, 'that is not what we wished to say.' They were silent, then they spoke slowly, and their words were halting, like a child learning to speak for the first time: 'We are one... alone... and only... and we love you who are alone... alone... and only.' We looked in each other's eyes and we knew that the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly."
This excerpt from Anthem is a heart wrenching example of humanity's struggle for individuality, and the undying instinct of love, despite the zealous attempts to make men into automatons; devoid of all emotion and desire for meaning. Prometheus' character begins to discover self in the very beginning of the novel wherein his desire to be a Scholar overrides his enforced service as a Street Sweeper. Prometheus, essentially, reinvents electricity, attempting to usher in a new age, where men are not shackled to predestined obligations, and bringing about the ideas and technology of the Unmentionable Times back to the light.
Ayn Rand displays the human struggle for sense and self wonderfully in the novel, bringing Prometheus' struggle to the readers with his catalogued thoughts, and the bitter motes of rediscovered emotion. Along with his very thoughts and emotions, Rand makes the struggle concrete in Prometheus' rediscovery of the lightbulb. All of man, it seems, has regressed to a state of collectivism where technology is shunned and the ideals of creativity, self expression, and (obviously) individualism are erased from the minds of all, forcing them to BE the whole, rather than a part of it. Prometheus' and Gaea's discovery of individual lvoe, a favoring of another over all men, is an essential symbol of the novel, showing that even with total obliteration of self and the indvidual, love, the most primal of all human emotions, cannot be whipped out of humanity. No matter how utterly decimated, love cannot be beaten from the human mind, it will always break free, tear down the walls of the collective and break the barriers such as "The word 'We' is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it." In my own words, the novel was a wonderful example of society's failings in the idea that equality is always something good. Equality is not always a neccesarily good thing, such as in the cases of extreme socialism and communism, and when men are truly equal, no one can be exceptional, no one can exert their talents to their full extent, lest they exceed past the established norm.