Light And Dark In Anthem, By Ayn Rand

“The light came into the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it, but that no longer mattered because the light was now obliteration the darkness” - Ted Dekker. According to this quote, there is always going to be a battle between light and dark. One is always trying to overcome the other no matter how much strength it has. This quote goes hand and hand with Equality, who is the main character in the book Anthem by Ayn Rand. In this book, these people live in a terrible time of darkness, restriction and punishment. There are no feelings, no colors and no friends. At age 15, you are assigned a job that you will do for the rest of your life. Everyday is the same. You are not allowed to have relationships and you are not allowed to have

The dark will always be resistant to the light.

In the book Anthem by Ayn Rand, darkness is something that haunts this totalitarian society. Darkness is represented by the council and all the pain and fear it causes. The council punishes them and sucks the light out of everything, for example, speaking of The Unmentionable Times. The Unmentionable Times is the time of happiness and freedom before The Great Rebirth. The council refuses to let anyone speak of it or else you will be put to death: “There is some word, one single word which is not in the language of men, but which has been. And this is the unspeakable word...But when they speak it they are put to death” (Rand 49). For speaking a single word, the council puts a person to death. This is an extreme punishment

Equality performs science experiments every night in his newly discovered tunnel for 3 hours each night. He did this with a few other people for two years. In this time he made a discovery that changed him forever, electricity. He was cutting open a frog and his knife accidentally touched the copper wire the frog was hanging on and the frog shook. They tested it with the candles blown out, “Darkness swallowed us. There was nothing left around us, nothing saved the night, and a thin thread of flame in it... we stretched our hands to the wire, and we saw our fingers in the red glow” (Rand 59/60). This light shines through the tunnel, it gives them hope, it gives them light and it gives them happiness. This was their breakthrough. Breaking through the darkness of their society, the pain, the punishment was all gone. It felt like nothing mattered when that wire glowed for those few seconds. The second Equality saw that light glow, he knew he needed to break through the norm. He decided he was going to show The World Council of Scholars that was coming in a few days. He was caught though for not being in his house at night and taken to jail. He was whipped and beaten but all he could think about was showing his new discovery. He escaped the jail the day they came so he could show them his invention. He expected praise for his groundbreaking discovery, but instead something