by Onkar Ghate
Excerpts:
Anyone who reads John Galt’s radio broadcast and who has some familiarity with the ideas that have shaped and continue to shape Western culture, should recognize his speech as a statement overflowing with original ideas—the work of an enormously powerful mind, whether or not you happen to agree with the speech’s content.
But as impressive as the speech is, many readers I think fail to appreciate the integral role the speech plays in the action and story of Atlas Shrugged. I’ve met more than a few readers who skipped over the speech on a first reading of the novel, treating it as an interruption in the action, impatient to see how Ayn Rand’s dramatic story ends. The implicit premise of such fast-forwarding is that you can understand the story’s ending without understanding the content of the speech. I don’t think this is true.
Even many readers who don’t skip the speech regard it as something of a digression or as a pause in the action, albeit a fascinating one. When I ask such readers why Galt gives his radio broadcast, they are almost always at a loss to answer. Often, their reply is that the speech is primarily a vehicle for Rand to disseminate her ideas and is only tenuously connected to the progression of the story. Again, I don’t think this is true.
The theme of Atlas Shrugged, it is important to keep in mind throughout this discussion, is (as Rand formulated it): “the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest.”1 Equally important, the novel’s plot-theme—a literary term coined by Rand and which she defined as “the central conflict or ‘situation’ of a story—a conflict in terms of action, corresponding to the theme and complex enough to create a purposeful progression of events”—is: “the men of the mind going on strike against an altruist-collectivist society.”2 Atlas Shrugged is a novel about a strike.
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