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45 pages 1 hour read

Yevgeny Zamyatin

We

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1921

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Character Analysis

D-503

When the protagonist D-503 is summoned to the Benefactor at the novel’s end, following the Mephi’s failed plot, he learns that he could have become “the greatest of all conquistadores” (84). This is the culmination of this knight’s quest and the end of his Sir Gawain-esque adventure. As the Integral’s chief builder, he would have been responsible for taking the One State philosophy into space and spreading it to other civilizations, but he, like Gawain, is captivated by the allure of the past and its potent mythology. At first, D-503 takes on this mission with glee. He is convinced that the One State has found a “mathematical, perfect life” (1), and he even begins a journal to document this perfection, to help convince other societies. Yet, as he writes in this journal, D-503’s conviction starts to waver. Seduced by I-330 and the possibility of a more vital way of life, he begins to break the rules, asking whether there is something beyond the rationally proscribed happiness of the One State. He is the primary instrument through which the narrative explores the theme of The Conformist and Subversive Potential of Writing.

In the beginning, his rebellion is small. It involves simply not reporting I-330’s transgressions and drinking alcohol. D-503 starts falling in love with I-330 and, especially after experiencing passionate sex with her which contrasts profoundly with the state-sanctioned version of the act, he discovers “something wild… red and hairy” (21) in himself that demands more. Even as he blasts the rules of conduct for One State citizens, he begins to adopt a new code that resembles chivalry. Romantic love and the potential to prove himself worthy of I-330’s affection influence him. With I-330’s help, D-503 goes beyond the Green Wall that separates the One State from the natural world and experiences an ecstatic unity with nature and the people there. This experience convinces him to join a doomed conspiracy to overthrow the One State. In this way, D-503 does not become a conquistador of the planets, as loyalty to the One State would have made him. Instead, he becomes a conquistador and explorer of the human “soul.” He charts a new world of alienation, love, and betrayal beyond the confines of the One State’s happiness and thereby finds unexplored depths to himself. Unfortunately, such a journey induces emotional vertigo. In the end, D-503 renounces such exploration when he doubts the authenticity of I-330’s love for him. He allows the One State to remove his imagination and opts for a radical constriction of experience. He is a possible example of a bogatyr, a knight-errant of Kievan Rus’, because he breaks away from his world of origin on a quest to right the wrongs in his world. His lady ideal, I-330, is dispelled and therefore he loses his will to pursue the moralist ideals she represented.

I-330

I-330 operates as the lady love and ideal, who presents D-503 with a quest and then inspires him for its duration. At the end of the novel, when D-503 enters I-330’s flat after he meets with the Benefactor, he finds “an unfamiliar name on some of the pink checks strewn across the floor” (27). For D-503, this confirms and symbolizes what the Benefactor suggested to him: that I-330 used him to get to the Integral and never really loved him. Further, this idea is confirmed by I-330’s behavior toward D-503 throughout We. She invokes the allure of the past and uses her mystery and beauty to seduce D-503, the knight she needs to bring about the downfall of the One State. This quest starts when she binds his loyalty to her and persuades him to lie for her. She further secures his allegiance to her when she forces alcohol into his mouth. This act is a metaphor for I-330’s whole relationship to D-503. Dressed “in a saffron dress of an ancient style” (20), she kisses D-503 with “unbearably sweet lips” (21), at the same time passing liquor into his mouth. Thus, I-330 not only uses D-503’s attraction to her to make him break the law, but she also employs her sexuality to intoxicate D-503, which makes him more suggestible to still deeper transgressions against the One State. Her captivation is reminiscent of Sybilla or Morgan le Fay in Arthurian legend or Circe in The Odyssey.

However, there is also another side to I-330. While she does, in one sense, use D-503, threatening to leave him if he does not help with the Mephi’s plot, she is sincere in her affection for him. She tells D-503 that “there are in you a few drops of that blood of the sun and the woods” (64). His “ape-like” (3) hands, which she later says is a feature women used to fall in love with, intrigue her. In this regard, I-330 is genuinely attracted to D-503 and is not only manipulating him. She sees something vital and natural in D-503 which she seeks to liberate, and which he sees as well. Of course, I-330 does leave D-503 in the end. But that is out of fidelity to her ideals, not mere indifference to D-503. She keeps loyal to these ideals, even under torture by the One State. For this reason, she could be considered the anti-hero of the novel.

O-90

O-90 is a functional character that exists to introduce features of the One State. She represents a source of conflict between D-503’s old and new values. At the start of We, D-503 remarks of O-90 that “she is approximately ten centimeters shorter than the required Maternal Norm” (2). She is D-503’s assigned sexual partner, but One State’s judgment on O-90’s stature means that she is forbidden to have children. She serves as an example of the One State’s implicit marginalization of women. Yet this judgment and marginalization of O-90 is not restricted to the state. After meeting I-330, D-503 effectively marginalizes O-90, treating her as peripheral to the greater dramas of his life. This is seen, in his ostensible “compliment” of O-90, saying that she is “simple, regular and limited like a circle” (24), which is an indication that he turns away from his once robust embrace of the One State. He further suggests that I-330 lacks such “limitedness,” which shows his acceptance of a new way of thinking. The subtext that O-90 is regular, unexciting, and—unlike I-330—can be taken for granted reveals the internalized misogyny in the marginalization by the state but also by D-503. This marginalization is reflected in the narrative itself. In contrast to D-503 and I-330, O-90 rarely features in the action, and only then runs after D-503.

Yet there is more to O-90 than this judgment of her by the One State and D-503 would suggest. While not the explicit anti-state firebrand represented by I-330, she is nonetheless rebellious and unconventional in her way. For example, when she hears that D-503 is reporting an offense to the Guardians, she replies “…to the spies? How ugly! And I went to the Botanical Garden and brought you a branch of the Lilly of the Valley” (14). O-90 then recognizes, and critiques, the vulgarity of a system based on informants and secret police. At the same time, she sets such ugliness against the beauty of nature, which she has somehow recovered and preserved. She is the evidence that the One State’s system is broken because not only does she succeed in conceiving a child, but she sacrifices her love for D-503 and her dignity and accepts help from I-330 to preserve her child’s life outside the wall. O-90 and her child survive. Though not involved like I-330 and D-503 in the high drama of plots, torture, and recantation, she nonetheless manages to keep her child beyond the walls of the One State. In this sense, O-90 represents a beacon of hope in an otherwise pessimistic conclusion to We. She also shows how there is more than one way to resist oppression and is an important foil for the appeal of fractious revolution. D-503 never realizes that in bearing his child and raising it outside the wall of the One State, O-90 succeeds where I-330 fails, and she takes a piece of D-503, a “shard of humanity,” with her.

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