45 pages • 1 hour read
Yevgeny ZamyatinWe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1921A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: Record 11, No, I Can’t; Let It Be Without Headings!
The following evening, R-13 arrives at D-503’s flat. D-503 praises R-13 for his poem the previous day about the execution. However, R-13 says that he is sick of talking about that poem, and instead wants to discuss a new poem that he wrote for the Integral’s launch. This new poem is about the “ancient legend of paradise” (22) of Adam and Eve, man’s fall into unhappiness by choosing freedom, and the reclamation of his happiness through the un-freedom of the One State. R-13 then reveals that he knows that D-503 has seen I-330. He asks D-503 if he still wants to carry on seeing O-90 and D-503 becomes irrationally angry and jealous. In his journaling of the event, D-503 describes how his other, “wild, hairy” (23) self confronted R-13. D-503 later apologizes to R-13 as he leaves but this incident leaves him with a sense that the triangle between R-13, O-90, and himself is irrevocably fractured.
Chapter 12 Summary: Record 12, The Delimitation of the Infinite—Angel—Meditations on Poetry
The next day, D-503, following a dreamless sleep, starts to believe that his anxiety and feelings of strangeness on the preceding days were the result of an illness from which he will recover. As such, he believes that everything will “again be simple, regular and limited like a circle” (25), like his relationship with O-90. And this feeling is re-reinforced by the knowledge that he will see her in 24 hours. D-503 also reflects that, in contrast to 0-90, I-330 lacks beauty because she lacks O-90’s limitedness. On the underground railway to work, D-503 reads a poem R-13 gave him the previous evening about the beauty of the times tables. This poem comforts D-503 and leads him to reflect on how the One State commissions poetry to harmonize with and support the laws of society, rather than work against them.
Chapter 13 Summary: Record 13, Fog—Thou—A Decidedly Absurd Adventure
On the morning that D-503 will see O-90 again, and on the way toward mandated physical exercise, he receives a call from I-330 telling him to meet her immediately around the corner. There I-330 takes D-330 to the Medical Bureau where a doctor friend of hers gets them certificates, testifying that they cannot go to work that day due to illness. I-330 then leads D-503 back to the Ancient House where, in the room with the brass Buddha, they make love. On I-330’s instruction, D-503 then leaves. However, moved by a desire to touch her shoulder one more time he returns to the room only to find that I-330 is no longer there, despite there being only one exit. He finds a key swinging in the closet.
Chapter 14 Summary: Record 14, “Mine”—Impossible—A Cold Floor
At 9:30 p.m., O-90 comes to see D-503 as planned. However, O-90 recognizes that something is wrong, declaring to D-503, “you are not the same, not the same man! You are no longer mine!” (28). D-503 lies to 0-90, saying that any difference is because he is sick and that he has recently been to the Medical Bureau. Because of his earlier meeting with I-330, he is unable to perform sexually with 0-90. She becomes distraught and storms out of his flat.
Chapter 15 Summary: Record 15, The Bell—The Mirror-Like Sea—I Am to Burn Eternally
D-503 hears at work how, when he was away the previous day, “a male without a number” (30), an opponent of the One State, got into the area where the builders work on the Integral. D-503 discusses how the man will be taken to “the Gas Bell” (30). This is a torture device that slowly brings subjects to the point of death by sucking air out of a glass bell. The state uses torture to extract information and intends to discover why the man was there. D-503 also mentions to a colleague a recently invented operation to remove the human imagination. Secretly, D-503 feels that now that he has an imagination, he does not want a cure for it.
Chapter 16 Summary: Record 16, Yellow—A Two-Dimensional Shadow—An Incurable Soul
Several days later, D-503 is feeling depressed because he has not seen I-330 since their meeting at the Ancient House. Disconsolate, he hangs around her block of flats and then goes to the Medical Bureau to ask about the strange new emotions he experiences. The doctor there, who had previously given him the illness certificate, tells D-503 that he developed a soul, which leads him to absorb rather than reflect his experiences. The doctor says that this state is incurable but recommends long walks and advises him to walk as far as the Ancient House the next morning.
Chapter 17 Summary: Record 17, Through Glass—I Died—The Corridor
Following the doctor’s advice, D-503 walks to the Ancient House the next day, past the “Green Wall” (35) which separates the One State city from the natural world outside. Inside the Ancient House, D-503 looks for I-330 in the room with the Buddha and the closet. D-503 opens the closet which still has a key in the lock and has an out-of-body experience as he feels himself descending to a lower level on a platform. He then walks into a dimly lit corridor before he finds another room from which the doctor then I-330 emerge. I-330 tells D-503 that he will hear from her the day after tomorrow at 4:00 p.m.
Chapter 18 Summary: Record 18, Logical Debris—Wounds and Plaster—Never Again
The night after the incident in the corridor, D-503 dreams that I-330 is in his closet and that he clings to her while a ray of light falls upon her neck. The dream leads D-503 to consider how hidden things, like his soul, can be just as real as physically present things, like his boots. In the evening, D-503 receives a letter from O-90 saying that she can no longer see him and that she must strike him from her list of partners. For, she says, although she loves D-503, she believes that he loves I-330. D-503 reflects that no longer seeing O-90 might be for the best.
Chapter 19 Summary: Record 19, The Infinitesimal of the Third Order—From Under the Forehead—Over the Railing
The next day at four, on his way to a lecture, a man gives D-503 a letter from I-330. After what I-330 said in the Ancient House, D-503 expects the letter to specify a time they can meet. Instead, the letter contains a pink check from I-330 and the instruction that he should “lower the curtains as if I were actually with you” (41) during his sexual hour, even though she will not be there. He returns to his flat in the evening and unexpectedly sees O-90 there, who asks for an answer to her note about no longer seeing each other. She tells D-503 that she wants to have his baby. D-503 agrees to O-90’s wish and closes the curtains to have sex with her, despite knowing that such procreation is illegal.
Chapter 20 Summary: Record 20, Discharge—The Material of an Idea—The Zero Rock
After he has sex with O-90 so she can conceive, D-503 feels contrite regarding his various crimes and betrayals of the One State. He wishes now to enjoy his “right” for the state to punish and kill him. D-503 reflects on how the deaths of those who disobey the One State, like himself, the dissident poet, and O-90, might seem analogous to the cruelty and punishments of past human eras. He argues that this appearance is superficial, for such deaths in the One State serve a higher and mathematically determined function, like the divine justice of the Ancients’ God.
Chapters 11-20 Analysis
Events in this section further develop the theme of The Religious Character of State Collectivism. After D-503 sleeps with I-330 for the first time she calls him “my fallen angel” (27). Evoking Paradise Lost’s Satan, this comment suggests not just that D-503 has here sinned against the One State. It implies that he has done so in an irrevocable and self-transformative manner. While D-503 may have transgressed against the One State before, drinking alcohol and not reporting I-330, this act consummates D-503’s dissent in a new and decisive way. This is because, as D-503 says “there was no pink check” (27). Having sex with someone outside the regulated system and at an illicit location strikes at the heart of the One State’s social organization and life. It is more serious and has more insurrectionary intent than breaking specific laws about alcohol or reporting others. D-503’s crime here is active. When I-330 shirked work or kissed alcohol into D-503’s mouth, she had created a situation where he had to act to stop an offense, making his inaction on these occasions passive crimes of omission. In contrast, D-503 is a full, active participant when they have sex in the Ancient House. The narration juxtaposes D-503’s illegal sex with Adam’s eating of the apple in Genesis. This juxtaposition promotes the One State as a figure equal to God in Genesis.
Like Adam’s biblical act, D-503’s precipitates an irrevocable fall from grace. On an immediate level, D-503’s choice casts him out of the harmonious, socially approved joy of his relationships with O-90 and R-13. Instead, “that insanity called love and jealousy” confronts him (23). Jealousy over R-13’s connection to I-330 destroys his friendship with R-13, and his preoccupation with I-330 means that his sexual relationship with O-90 no longer satisfies him. Meanwhile, the narrative evolves the theme of How Industrial Modernity Alienates Humans from Nature and Themselves as the “humanized machine” (31) of life and work in the One State alienates D-503. As he says, “I shall…never again be able to fuse myself into this mechanical rhythm, nor to float over this mirror-like, untroubled sea” (31). Observing the absorbed, seamless, work of the Integral’s builders striving toward a single aim, D-503 recognizes that he can no longer participate in this version of life. As with the One State’s unity and purpose overall, D-503’s new awareness dislocates him from the straightforward meaning and good conscience that comes through being part of the One State collective.
Such alienation is not just destructive. While D-503 experiences doubt, absence, and loss of meaning because of his pivotal transgression with I-330, something new is born from his despair. He walks to the Medical Bureau and sees “the world turned upside down” (33) and “myself also upside down” (32). The doctor says, “The surface becomes a volume, a body, a world” (33), while, previous experiences passed smoothly and uncritically over D-503, as in a mirror, they now remain “inside” him, creating a permanent depth, which the doctor calls a “soul” (33), and it represents the new, free, and troubled self that emerges from D-503’s break with the One State. It signifies an altered awareness of the world where he determines values and possibilities and does not accept those that the state defines and prescribes.
The birth of D-503’s soul is bound up with the awakening of his imagination. This is something one of the medical bureau’s doctors recognizes when he suggests that they could cure D-503 of his soul if they remove his “center for fancy” (33). The capacity to imagine and believe in that which is not immediately present or socially endorsed, in a “world somewhere beneath the surface of our life” (38), is what underscores D-503’s new sense of self. New and individual ways of being are possible because people can see and desire beyond what current society offers. This is the symbolic meaning of the corridors D-503 finds when looking for I-330. Hidden under the Ancient House, and in semi-darkness, these conduits represent the liminal depths of D-503’s spirit, which he discovers when he follows through on his desire for I-330. Re-emerging beyond the One State city, they also represent the dark and dangerous paths that one traverses to discover a new way of life.
