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 31-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary: Record 31, The Great Operation—I Forgave Everything—The Collision of Trains
Content Warning: This section of the guide mentions suicide.
The following day, the One State newspaper announces that “the road to a hundred percent happiness is open” (71). This they will achieve through a recently discovered operation to remove the imagination, which promises to make Numbers more perfectly integrated with the state. D-503 believes that the procedure might still redeem him from his crimes against the state. I-330 instructs D-503 to see her and forces D-503 to choose between getting the operation or seeing her again. Because of this ultimatum, D-503 decides to continue to oppose the state and agrees to help I-330 and the Mephi seize the Integral on the day of its launch.
Chapter 32 Summary: Record 32, I Do Not Believe—Tractors—A Little Human Splinter
On the day before the Integral’s flight, D-503 sees a column of people who have just had the operation to remove their imagination. He finds himself herded along in the crowd toward one of the operating rooms. He manages to escape and sees O-90 outside. O-90 tells him that she wants I-330’s help to save her baby by getting it beyond the Green Wall. However, as D-503 is taking O-90 to see I-330, he realizes S-4711 is following them. D-503 returns to his flat so that he doesn’t lead S-4711 to I-330. Instead of going in person, he tells O-90 that he will write a note to I-330 asking for her help.
Chapter 33 Summary: Record 33, This Without a Synopsis, Hastily, The Last
The next day, which is the day D-503 plans to help hijack the Integral, the state newspaper declares that tomorrow “all numbers are to come to be operated upon” (76). Those who fail to do so, it adds, will be executed. D-503 feels that this is his last day alive, or his last in his current life, so he bids farewell to his unknown readers to whom he bares his soul throughout his journal.
Chapter 34 Summary: Record 34, The Forgiven Ones—A Sunny Night—A Radio-Walkyrie
On the Integral’s maiden voyage, everything seems to be going to plan for D-503 and the Mephi. I-330 and other Mephi are aboard the Integral with the regular crew and in the engine room, I-330 tells D-503 that O-90 is “already beyond the wall” (78) with his child. However, minutes before noon, when D-503 is supposed to lock the regular crew in the dining area to allow the Mephi to seize the ship, a man who reveals himself as a Guardian stops him. The Guardian declares that he knows about their plan and commands D-503 to complete the Integral’s original flight plan. I-330 glances at D-503 when this happens. She believes that it was D-503 who betrayed them. D-503 suddenly realizes that it was U- who betrayed their plan, as she likely read his journal. As the Integral returns to earth, the Integral’s second builder hits D-503 in the face.
Chapter 35 Summary: Record 35, In a Ring—A Carrot—A Murder
The day after the Integral’s flight, D-503 sets out to kill U- for betraying him and the Mephi. He does not find her at her desk or in the street, but in the evening when he returns home, she comes to his room. D-503 is about to strike her with a pipe when U- takes off her clothes. U- assumes that D-503 threatened her because of sexual frustration. This absurd miscommunication makes D-503 laugh and abandon his plans to kill her. The next moment, D-503 receives a call from the Benefactor himself asking D-503 to see him immediately.
Chapter 36 Summary: Record 36, Empty Pages—The Christian God—About My Mother
D-503 goes to meet the Benefactor, an immense figure with “enormous, cast-iron hands” (84). The Benefactor tells D-503 that he could have been “the greatest of all the conquistadors” (84). He says that with the operation to “cure” imagination, the One State has almost achieved paradise on earth because the operation eliminates unattainable desires. That was until D-503 and the Mephi interfered. However, the Benefactor explains, the Mephi just used D-503 to gain access to the Integral.
Chapter 37 Summary: Record 37, Infusorian—Doomsday—Her Room
The next morning, while in the refectory, D-503 hears a commotion in the streets and notices a mass of strange black shapes in the sky. These, it turns out, are birds, and they are in the city because the Mephi have blown a hole in the Green Wall. D-503 then goes into the street and looks for I-330. He observes as the tightly ordered world of the One State dissolves, with couples openly copulating in flats without their curtains drawn. D-503 heads to I-330’s apartment but she is not there. He finds her room in a state of disarray with pink checks with his name and that of another unknown Number, F-, scattered over the floor.
Chapter 38 Summary: Record 38, I Don’t Know What Title—Perhaps the Whole Synopsis May Be Called a Cast-Off Cigarette Butt
D-503 wakes later that day to see I-330 beside his bed. He tries to tell her that he did not betray her on the Integral, but she insists that they do not talk about it, as the Mephi are waiting below, and she does not have much time. D-503 and I-330 hold each other and kiss, and he asks I-330 if she came to inquire if he would get the operation. However, D-503 then realizes that she knows that the answer is “yes” and that they must thus say goodbye forever.
Chapter 39 Summary: Record 39, The End
The next morning D-503 reaffirms his commitment to get the operation and goes out onto the street. There he sees and steps over the corpse of the poet R-13. He proceeds to the Bureau of Guardians where he confesses all that he did to S-4711, including accepting faked medical certificates, and going beyond the Green Wall via the Ancient House. However, S-4711 says that D-503 also did not admit to seeing S-4711 beyond the Green Wall, when he had been there, suggesting that S-4711 too had been part of the anti-state resistance. Before he goes in to have the operation, D-503 talks to a man who claims he discovered that, mathematically, there can be no infinity.
Chapter 40 Summary: Record 40, The Facts—The Bell—I Am Certain
The following morning when D-503 wakes up, he feels like a different person and writes about the previous day’s events after his conversation about the impossibility of infinity with the unnumbered man. D-503 went in for the operation in the evening, along with all the remaining Numbers who had not completed it. Benefactor then summoned him and “told him everything” (92) about “the enemies of happiness” (92), including his betrayal of I-330. With the Benefactor, he watched I-330’s torture under the Glass Bell, where the torturers brought her to the point of death and resuscitated her several times. Unlike others who were brought in and tortured after her, I-330 did not speak. D-503 notes that I-330 and the others are slated for execution the next day. In his last sentence in the journal, he asserts that the One State, and reason, will inevitably triumph over its enemies.
Chapters 31-40 Analysis
A day before the planned seizure of the Integral by the Mephi, D-503 observes a group of people who have just had their imaginations removed. As he says, “The word ‘people’ is not the right one. These were heavy wheeled automatons bound in iron and moved by an invisible mechanism” (73). D-503 finds the effects of the new operation horrifying. When the state excises its citizens “centers for fancy” it strips them of both their humanity and their free will. They become affectless, mechanical slaves. They differ little, as D-503 suggests, from “human tractors” (73). The state description of the operation reinforces D-503’s horror. As the newspaper says, the imagination, a “knot in the lower region of the frontal lobe of the brain,” can be cured by a “triple treatment …with X-rays” (70). The procedure sounds not only disturbingly like a lobotomy, but also excruciating. U- pinpoints the operation’s traumatic character when she says of her students, that “it was necessary to bind them afterwards with ropes” (72). This operation is allegorical in its significance to the discussion of the effects of authoritarian thought control. The narrative graphically describes a literal operation, but authoritarians use brainwashing techniques that essentially rid their adherents of the imagination necessary to question the party line. Zamyatin and other writers of dystopian fiction often use allegories of this type to present the danger they perceive not just in authoritarian leaders but in their followers as well. This is the most brutal example in the novel of the integration of the two themes, The Religious Character of State Collectivism and How Industrial Modernity Alienates Humans from Nature and Themselves. The operation symbolizes thought control through mass appeals in authoritarian power as well as strong-armed tactics and fearmongering. These tactics demonstrate both the cultlike status of authoritarianism and the divorcing of followers from their own nature and best interests.
Despite at first welcoming the operation to remove imagination as redemptive and eagerly undergoing the procedure at the novel’s end, D-503’s feelings about the operation are inconsistent. While he believes that overthrowing the One State is possible and that he has a chance to be with the woman he loves, he avoids the procedure. However, when D-503 loses hope of a successful transition to a new society and faces humiliation from I-330, who blames him for the plan’s failure, his choice to have the operation is an act of resignation. D-503 recognizes that the operation will remove the most human part of him and “amounts to suicide” (90), but it will also spare him the pain of envisioning a happier life that he can never have.
D-503’s acceptance of the operation also reflects his disillusionment with the Mephi. His realization that they were using him makes the union with nature and their group seem like an illusion. This in turn makes him regard the ideal of freedom they espouse as hollow. He sees the Mephi are merely another iteration of the collectivist cult, like the One State, which uses people’s talents and steals their autonomy and agency.
The final push toward accepting the operation comes when D-503 searches for I-330 in her room only to discover “an unfamiliar name on some of the pink checks” (87). This confirms that I-330 had other lovers, and thus used the appeal of a more authentic sexual experience to ensnare D-503 to her cause. The realization that her love for him was merely a performance is the catalyst for D-503’s epiphany in I-330’s room. This plot point is not only a romantic tragedy but also the apotheosis of his sense of total dejection. I-330’s betrayal of D-503 crystalizes his general sense of isolation and casts him down into the pain of unrequited love, unfulfilled human connection, and disillusionment of an important dream.
The operation therefore functions as an anesthetic to D-503’s emotional turmoil and a way to “know no desires anymore” (84). By excising imagination, the procedure destroys the desire for anything “farther” (70) beyond serving a function in the One State. In this way, it offers freedom for D-503 from life’s pain. The price for this is a radical muting of consciousness and feeling. Because living in the One State did not prepare citizens for the full range of human experience and freedom, nor did it succeed in eliminating the desire for such a life, D-503 finds that a medically induced automaton’s half-life is the lesser of two horrors.
