I finished the book and I just want to say, "wow, not what I expected. At all. What a bummer". So I just said that and now I'm going to do my journal.
As far as motifs go, nature is coming up a lot more than in the first third or half or so of the book. This clearly is part of D-503 falling deeper into his illness, because on the last two pages after D has been cured he mentions no nature to speak of. Although nature doesn't come up when D is well again, he still uses it to describe the more "ugly" things that take place in his life. While the One State is essentially burning to the ground, Zamyatin describes the frantic people with "open mouths, arms waving like branches. They must have been the source of all this howling, cawing, buzzing"(198). These people are lost, with no idea what to do. Their way of life is collapsing around them, so they are reverting to savagery. The animalistic language combined with the motif of nature here is bringing a sense of negativity (I could use a better word here, but I can't think of one) towards all these people's conditions. They, for the first time in their lives, are free! The problem is, however, that they think the way of the One State is the only way to live and that freedom brings savagery and unhappiness. This is where we get D's negative feelings towards them as expressed in the nature-ish words like branches, cawing, howling and buzzing.
Well, I kind of lumped motifs and language in with eachother on that one, so I'm going to do it again to be more thorough. There is a point in the book where nature actually, much to the people's dismay, finds its way in to the one state. The first time this happens is in D-503's 37th entry, when the brids come in from outside the green wall and it's electric cieling. Nature is, again, described by Zamyatin with harsh, almost ugly language. The birds produce "hoarse, gutteral drops of sound from above", and are described as "sharp, black, piercing, falling triangles"(191). The first part of the passage makes a lot of sense to me as far as language goes. Words like hoarse and gutteral are used to express the society's disgust with nature, as we have seen throughout basically the whole book. What I don't get is why the birds are also labeled as triangles. Something that comes from nature, something so free, unpredictable, and "ugly", should not be labeled as a geometric shape. Why? Because the One State loves math. I bet they even love geometry, even though a lot of people don't. Since geometry, and subsequently, such nice shapes as triangles, are part of the math that society is based on, then why label a "stupid", "ugly" bird with something so revered in society? This could be D's way of showing us he has a soul, and is blending the society he loves with the nature he knows belongs in his life and is coming to accept. Or it could be a translation issue. I don't know if there are any other Russian words for triangle, but I know that some other people in my group have other translations. It would be interesting to see what they have!
Setting is an entirely different ball game! The One State is pretty established as a setting, so there's not much to talk about there. I did find one of the little blurbs on the Integral kind of interesting, and it clued me in as to how the society works. The quote that I don't feel like properly integrating reads "everyone was already all assembled, everyone was in their places, all the honeycombs of the gigantic hive were filled. There were tiny, antlike people below, [...] standing at telegraphs, dynamos, transformers, altimeters, valves, arrows, motors, pumps, pipes"(172). It is shown here how complex the society is, and how everyone is working as part of a whole in order to achieve a greater purpose. The people are almost like robots, and Zamyatin makes it appear that way by saying that they're "assembled". Everyone is part of a machine, standing at their various parts and waiting to be activated. The Integral is part of a mission that will spead the views of the One State intergalactically, so it is natural that the thing doing so is made according to these values. The workers who run the integral are dehumanized, and deindividualized as they are lumped in as part of this greater being. I also found the comparison to the beehive to be interesting, although it seemed rather off as part of a paragraph about a machine. The people working the integral could also be a part of a beehive, all working towards a goal (or multiple goals, making honey, feeding the queen...), but here Zamyatin chooses to describe them using nature! Since the people are also described as antlike not two sentences before the bee reference, I think Zamyatin might be doing something by involving insects in his writing. Although insects are a part of nature, they aren't really that amazing or unpredictable or untamable. Ants can be squished under a boot, and bees follow a simple routine of, leave hive, get nectar, come back to hive, deposit nectar, repeat. Insects are mindless, predictable things that can easily be compared with the people of the One State who blindly follow the Benefactor and accept all the rules forced on to them because they don't know any better. Nature can be somewhat predictable, but only in its simplest form.
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