Dagny and the Guard

[BaalChatzaf]

In -Atlas Shrugged-, Dagny confronts a guard and threatens him with a loaded gun in order to let the team rescuing John Galt in through the door. The guard cannot make up his mind so Dagny shoots him for NOT MAKING UP HIS MIND!!!!!..

Now that is damned strange. I can see shooting him to prevent him from warning the people inside. In fact, that might have been Dagny's only practical course. Slaying sentries is a time honored way in commando operations which the rescue of John Galt surely was. But killing the poor sod because he vacillated? That is perverse.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited December 16, 2007 by BaalChatzaf

[Dragonfly]

This is indeed the most perverse passage in AS.

[Philip Coates]

> the guard cannot make up his mind do Dagny shoots him for NOT MAKING UP HIS MIND!!!!!..

The passage says "fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness." Note that it does not say and nowhere on that page does it suggest that she shot him BECAUSE of that. If so, she would have had to shoot half the staff of Taggart Transcontinental.

Rand expects the fair-minded, non-hostile reader to fill in the blanks: If the guard vacillates and stalls her entry the whole plan to free Galt, which depends on speed and surprise, can fall apart since the guards are armed and can kill all of them or shout out for reinforcements.

Every moment she waits her life is at risk.

Note also that she does have an exchange with him in which she gives him every chance to get out of the way.

[BaalChatzaf]

Rand expects the fair-minded, non-hostile reader to fill in the blanks: If the guard vacillates and stalls her entry the whole plan to free Galt, which depends on speed and surprise, can fall apart since the guards are armed and can kill all of them or shout out for reinforcements.

If speed and surprise were necessary conditions for the raid then she should have shot him with a silenced pistol or cut his throat with piano wire (a common method of killing sentries in stealthy raids). If the guard had given in promptly, what would have stopped him from warning his mates inside? Under the circumstances, the success of the mission depended on silencing the guard and removing him from the door. Dagny (being a female of slender build) was not strong enough to knock the man out with the butt of her pistol so killing him was the only practical alternative she had.

In which case has acquiescence, his co-operator or his resistance were irrelevant. What was required was silencing him (by whatever practical means) and removing him from the door.

I stand on my judgment that killing him for vacillating was a pretty poor reason to kill him. There were better reasons. Particularly when you combine this scene with Rands judgment pertaining to the sociopath Hickman. I find Rand's judgment in these matters wanting.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

Oh, I think AR had Dagny shoot the guard because a guard shot Kira at the end of We The Living. The scene in Atlas was unrealistic because once Dagny got close to the guard she should have simply killed him without all that gab. It fit the novel, though, where a lot of people talk a lot. I'm always amused at movies where people stop to gab when they should shoot and end up getting shot instead. And, btw, when the heroes crash into the guard house they should be shooting all the way, killing all the guards--realistically. Of course, that would vulgarize and ruin the novel, a novel in which Ragnar the pirate inflicts no collateral damage and in which AR places a steel--Rearden metal?--factory on a seacoast so Ragnar can blow it up with his guns. I've never heard of a steel factory on a seacoast. AR may have underwritten Dagny's motivation. She might have had her shoot after the guard went for his gun (after all that chit-chat and explanation of his psycho-epistemology).

Too much about too little. Compared to someone like me, AR was a softy--and I'm a nice guy, albeit sometimes grouchy.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Bob,

You are right. There was no reason for her to have Dagny shoot the poor sod. She should have bombed him instead.

Michael

[Greybird]

I must admit that I've had a great deal of trouble, as well, seeing how what Dagny did was anything other than cold-blooded murder. Or how this can do anything other than dissipate a great deal of the reader's support for the character. Well, mine, anyway. (It also was out of character. She wouldn't have had anything near that simple a psychological conversion.)

If this was done under excuse of a "war," however small in scale, to free Galt, it suffers from the same collectivist excuse-making that Rand decried in her later non-fiction essays, especially "The Roots of War."

We do risk the same fallacy, though, as has often cropped up: assuming that what works as a dramatic event — where Dagny's action undeniably qualifies — can, or should, be seen as a touchstone of philosophy.

Rand thoroughly mixed the categories with Galt's novel-within-novel radio speech, of course, which is where the initial storytelling mistake lies.

She does so here with asseverating about "living without the responsibility of consciousness," which — in terms of the plot, rather than moralizing — is irrelevant, and abuses the position of the omniscient narrator. (Not as blatantly as she did preceding the destruction of the Taggart Tunnel, but almost.)

Edited December 16, 2007 by Greybird

[BaalChatzaf]

Bob,

You are right. There was no reason for her to have Dagny shoot the poor sod. She should have bombed him instead.

Michael

Too noisy for a commando operation. She should have decapitated the guard using piano wire.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Dragonfly]

> the guard cannot make up his mind do Dagny shoots him for NOT MAKING UP HIS MIND!!!!!..

The passage says "fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness." Note that it does not say and nowhere on that page does it suggest that she shot him BECAUSE of that. If so, she would have had to shoot half the staff of Taggart Transcontinental.

Nonsense. Of course she shot him exactly for that reason, that is the whole meaning of the scene! Rand didn't include that just to write a suspenseful passage, she wasn't that kind of superficial writer: she didn't write such a scene without a meaning. And that meaning is crystal clear, in fact she's shouting it at us: someone who cannot decide has forfeited his right to live and it is not immoral to kill him. That is the message she conveys, and it must take a lot of repression and rationalization to miss that message.

Rand expects the fair-minded, non-hostile reader to fill in the blanks: If the guard vacillates and stalls her entry the whole plan to free Galt, which depends on speed and surprise, can fall apart since the guards are armed and can kill all of them or shout out for reinforcements.

Every moment she waits her life is at risk.

Oh sure, and therefore she's entering into a page-long discussion with the guard! I'ts amazing to what heights of rationalization Objectivists can rise. If the message is embarrassing it must be reasoned away at all costs. All that talk about speed and surprise is irrelevant - if it was meant as a realistic scene, it would have been very different. But of course it was not meant as a realistic scene, it was meant as a philosophical lesson, as any intelligent reader immediately will understand.

[Wolf DeVoon]

Unless you've written a novel, criticism costs nothing. Dagny killing the guard and Francisco killing dozens of steelworkers were trumped by Galt killing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, by starvation, chaos, etc. Even good guy Eddie Willers was a doomed victim of rich white male ubermenschen.

Dr. Stadler was the prime mover whose collaboration with government necessitated the strike and collateral damage. Are you listening, Bob?

Edited December 16, 2007 by Wolf DeVoon

[galtgulch]

Bob,

You are right. There was no reason for her to have Dagny shoot the poor sod. She should have bombed him instead.

Michael

Too noisy for a commando operation. She should have decapitated the guard using piano wire.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Ba'al, You would enjoy reading the books recommended by Bidinotto by Vince Flynn who created a character, Mitch Rapp, who works undercover for our very own CIA as an assassin!

Start with Term Limits and read chronologically. You will not be disappointed.

galt

[Philip Coates]

**How to read Atlas in the Sloppy and Hostile Manner of her Worst Critics**

Baal Chatzaf: "If speed and surprise were necessary conditions for the raid then she should have shot him with a silenced pistol"

Ayn Rand: "Her gun was equipped with a silencer; there was no sound to attract anyone's attention"

And then #2 Greybird chimes in restating the error without answering my argument. Plus adding another criticism based on a careless reading of the two pages involved. Next up in the batter's cage, #3 Dragonfly with his usual hostility toward anyone who would defend Rand on anything - including a non-sequitur and a swipe at my intelligence. And, as icing on the cake, #4 Wolf adds on by disgustingly implying that revolution against a dictatorship (even one where you simply withdraw rather than bomb cities) is somehow the equivalent of Ayn Rand advocating genocide.

Wow! All this in just one morning.

This is why I traditionally bail out of these 'debates' and don't bother to reply to swat down a landslide of mistakes, poor readings, and oversimplifications. In this case led by the breathtakingly careless Baal who is not even fair-minded enough to read the VERY NEXT SENTENCE in the novel which rebuts his criticism!!!

...Will he say, "whoops" and acknowledge his mistake?

[Philip Coates]

*Ungrateful . . . and Unjust?*

Some of what irritates me is that part of the virtue of justice is having a sense of proportion -- praising the good, defending it when it is widely misunderstood. It's sort of like focusing one's discussions of American history on condemning Jefferson for owning slaves or the settlers for mistreating the Indians without having put that in the wider context of America and the founding fathers being so much better than all that had gone before.

Perhaps I have missed some of it since I don't read every thread, but haven't seen a lot of praise for - or sensed a lot of appreciation of - Atlas here. I don't know if the aforementioned posters have been as public in their praise and defense (or maybe just appreciation) of a magnificent literary and philosophical achievement as they have been in looking for flaws, which there are definitely going to be in a thousand-plus page novel which attempts the difficult task of both being a literary work and a philosophical one.

I, for example, will make criticisms of Rand and of her writing from time to time, but it's balanced against praise for the power, skill, moral qualities, and breakthroughs involved in one of the towering achievements in world literature and at the same time in philosophy.

Which dwarfs the complaints.

(That having been said -- and that context named and understood -- I have no problems with people being free to criticize. Even make erroneous criticisms, as are many of those so far in this and other threads.)

[Chris Grieb]

Phil; Thank you for being reasonable person on this Forum.

[Brant Gaede]

Unless you've written a novel, criticism costs nothing. Dagny killing the guard and Francisco killing dozens of steelworkers were trumped by Galt killing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, by starvation, chaos, etc. Even good guy Eddie Willers was a doomed victim of rich white male ubermenschen.

Dr. Stadler was the prime mover whose collaboration with government necessitated the strike and collateral damage. Are you listening, Bob?

Gotta agree with Phil on this one Wolf. Galt didn't kill those people. He simply refused to be killed by bad government, philosophy and parasites.

--Brant

[Selene]

*Ungrateful . . . and Unjust?*

Some of what irritates me is that part of the virtue of justice is having a sense of proportion -- praising the good, defending it when it is widely misunderstood. It's sort of like focusing one's discussions of American history on condemning Jefferson for owning slaves or the settlers for mistreating the Indians without having put that in the wider context of America and the founding fathers being so much better than all that had gone before.

Perhaps I have missed some of it since I don't read every thread, but haven't seen a lot of praise for - or sensed a lot of appreciation of - Atlas here. I don't know if the aforementioned posters have been as public in their praise and defense (or maybe just appreciation) of a magnificent literary and philosophical achievement as they have been in looking for flaws, which there are definitely going to be in a thousand-plus page novel which attempts the difficult task of both being a literary work and a philosophical one.

I, for example, will make criticisms of Rand and of her writing from time to time, but it's balanced against praise for the power, skill, moral qualities, and breakthroughs involved in one of the towering achievements in world literature and at the same time in philosophy.

Which dwarfs the complaints.

(That having been said -- and that context named and understood -- I have no problems with people being free to criticize. Even make erroneous criticisms, as are many of those so far in this and other threads.)

Quality observations. There is an old homile that states, "I never met a critic that built a bridge!" Furthermore, when the complainents are "dwarfs", one should just smile and move on. I guess we should all condemn Roebling for the erection of one of the great bridges in the world because he didn't make it high enough!

The petty carping of a great piece of literature in atempts to somehow ellevate one's self esteem is treated quite well in Atlas. Can we not just appreciate it for its groundbreaking scope and just say thank you and move on.

[Dragonfly]

That you shouldn't criticize an art work if you couldn't make something similar is of course complete bullshit. Do you have to be a composer to criticize a certain composition? Rand told us repeatedly how she detested An der schönen blauen Donau - how many compositions did she write herself? Do you have to be a painter to say what you don't like in a particular painting? How good could Rand paint? After all she had severe criticisms of a Rembrandt painting and told us that the impressionists were "silly".

Further it's rather presumptuous to call people of whom you know little or nothing "dwarfs" if you yourself can't spell even the simplest words: homile, complainents, atempts, ellevate. Where did you get your education?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Phil,

You have a point, this being an Objectivist board and all.

It is a good thing to hear something nice said about Atlas Shrugged once in a while. Actually, a lot has been said good about the book on OL, although recently this has mostly been about the 50th anniversary celebration and the movie.

But it is a good thing to remember balance. I am a strong believer in balance.

AS is a hell of a good book most any way you look at it. Even those who do not like it are hard put to deny that it is art with a capital "A."

After all, A is A.

Michael

[Dragonfly]

Those people who complain about the "lack of balance" might have a look at themselves. Why don't they write positive articles about AS to "balance" criticisms? Nobody stops them. Someone like Phil is always bitching about how other people are discussing, what they're doing wrong, how the forum should be managed etc., without contributing himself anything positive and useful. He's a born criticaster. As usual the best horseman is always on his feet.

[syrakusos]

... Why don't they write positive articles about AS to "balance" criticisms?

"50th Anniversary Essay, Submitted to College Newspaper" posts #1, #10, and #11.

Having paid my dues, I will say that over on RoR I also posted a parody of Atlas Shrugged. It is not all that hard to write like a man trying to make a point.

Sometimes it helps to turn things on their head, so to speak. In fact, on one project, I apparently impressed someone for this because when I left, the receptionist gave me a map from an executive office: the world seen from the inside.

Nonetheless, the scene with the guard was perfectly clear to me.

Here's one: How come in The Sun Also Rises, everyone always has enough money in their pockets? How about Casablanca? Do you mean to tell me that Rick showed up on the heels of fleeing France with enough cash to buy a bar when bankers and others were penniless except for all the money they would need to gamble at his place while waiting for exit visa? Lord of the Rings: What do the orcs in Moria eat? How did the dwarfs get food when they lived there? How come they could carve all of that out and not wake up the Balrog in the first place? The Right Stuff: after breaking the sound barrier, Chuck Yeager did not do a barrel roll in real life, so this is fakery. And then there is the movie where the glass moves from one side of the table to the other...

The difference between honest, insightful critical appraisal and mere bashing is as obvious as the mood of a person with a good sense of life.

Edited December 17, 2007 by Michael E. Marotta

[Philip Coates]

*not paying attention - levying a charge without investigating to see if it is true*

> Those people who complain about the "lack of balance" might have a look at themselves. Why don't they write positive articles about AS to "balance" criticisms?

Dragonfly, like Baal, seems to have a reading disorder. I've done so on more than one occasion before. One time even directly replying to Dragonfly:

(me, ol, 4/8/07 11:16 AM)

> it's true that all her villains in AS are robot caricatures. That is one of the big flaws in AS: there are only two kinds of people, glamorous, beautiful heroes and ugly, flabby, shifty villains who are all incompetent [Dragonfly]

This is a commonly repeated criticism of Atlas (or Rand's fiction more widely) and it's a fundamentally mistaken one for a number of reasons:

[and then I went on at great length]

And on another occasion, replying to Ellen:

Regarding Eddie Willers, Ellen asks whether "whatever is right" is a good answer for a ten-year old or whether it shows a lack of adventurousness. Part of the answer is Barbara's point that there is a distinction between taking something literally and literarily. Ayn Rand is not writing realistic fiction but stylized fiction. Eddie's quote is put in the book to stress his unbending nature where ethics is concerned. But Eddie is not an innovator, not on the mental level of the main heroes, so it would be a mistake to portray him as a leader or innovator, rather than a follower. Also, a good novelist has secondary characters who we only catch glimpses of. They are more one-dimensional, written to stress a trait or a characteristic. And so you can't really ask whether this single quote of Eddie's shows lack of independence if he were real, unless you know whether in another mood or situation he expressed an independent streak. What one is supposed to do in reading literature or in absorbing or trying to emulate Eddie (as opposed to doing psychology--a different context) is to abstract out that attitude of always doing what is right, forgetting whether it would be said at that age, and use it as inspiration to do so in one's own life.

This leads to a very important point: Ayn Rand not only did not fully flesh out all of her characters, but she did not sketch her good characters as -perfect-. ...

[and then I went on to explain this in some detail.]

I've also done this sort of thing on other boards, but why should Dragonfly acknowledge any of this since it conflicts with the attack he wants to make...?

[Brant Gaede]

This leads to a very important point: Ayn Rand not only did not fully flesh out all of her characters, but she did not sketch her good characters as -perfect-. ...

[and then I went on to explain this in some detail.]

I've also done this sort of thing on other boards, but why should Dragonfly acknowledge any of this since it conflicts with the attack he wants to make...?

She sure did. John Galt was perfect. That's why he was on top of the heap. AR considered him to be a "god." ("You don't get too close to a god.")

--Brant

[syrakusos]

Phil, I have disagreed with you on other issues, mostly of this kind of "sense of life" discussion. Clearly, we are different kinds of people. However, this engagement has allowed me to see what we have in common, why we are both in places like this and how we have lived out similar fundamentals, while markedly different in their expression.

Thank you for being a lantern in the window here.

[Ellen Stuttle]

This [Dagny shooting the guard] is indeed the most perverse passage in AS.

I didn't find it so; or the Winston Tunnel scene either, although I found both of those going a bit far for making the point. The scene which caused me some real troubles was Galt's refusing to let Francisco let Hank know that Dagny was still alive. ("Pity, Francisco?") Best I could do with that one was to attribute it to "plot device," but I made several attempts at imagined re-write. Re-writing wouldn't have been trivial, because of other details which would have had to be changed; but I think it could have been done without serious mess-up to the story.

Another detail which bothered me was Dagny's actually proceeding to obey Francisco's order to go back to sleep the night she wakes and finds him lying next to her in bed with a look of agony on his face. No way could I imagine myself having let it drop. But then...neither could I imagine Dagny's not having so much as pushed to find out the names of Francisco's two friends at school. (With that one, it was essential to the plot that she not know; had Franciso told her the names of his two school friends...)

Ellen

___

Edited December 17, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[Barbara Branden]

Michael M -- a beautiful post.

Phil, you wrote: "Some of what irritates me is that part of the virtue of justice is having a sense of proportion -- praising the good, defending it when it is widely misunderstood. It's sort of like focusing one's discussions of American history on condemning Jefferson for owning slaves or the settlers for mistreating the Indians without having put that in the wider context of America and the founding fathers being so much better than all that had gone before."

Bravo, Phil!

Barbara