Many events happen, most notably, Conway’s refusal to sell his rails to Taggart (albeit best price) and Dr. Simon Prichett’s threat to Rearden: that the State Science Institute would spread crap about him if he doesn’t sell his metal over. The two classes are juxtaposed, and we find that the traditional exploiter is actually the exploited.

Nakaima Oh also points out that Conway is the only guy who’s left out of the Gulch. Why? According to Nakaima, “He’s good but maybe not good enough?” I pointed out that it might have to do with publicity and bad social networking; his indictment was in a private meeting of top railroad officials, rather than as a public event. Perhaps Galt just did not know of him and what he’s done.

Rand’s technique for characterization is also of note. Personality is summarized by adages; an example would be Nealy: “Muscles, that’s all that’s required.”

I asked the group why they thought Rearden would not sell his Metal to the government, and the whole big deal about governmental funds being evil. “Rearden believes that his product is good enough that it’d beat the gov/SSI no matter what shiat they say about it.” One perspective on the anti-government issue may be that government-run operations are generally considered wasteful, and we don’t know which Rearden-like character the government conned to amass that wealth (not to mention that the wealth is worthless in the sense that the government can issue blank checks on their own random whim).

Official discussion transcript of chapter: http:// inacentaur.com/transcripts/2007-08-08.html
Official day’s discussion: http://slchatr.com/group/asc/sliterary/longhouse/2007-08-08

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 2:56 pm and is filed under part 1, chapters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.