We By Yevegeny Zamyatin

Sentence structure is one of the elements that captured me in this novel.  The way that Zamyatin wrote We shows D-503's emotions better than any other way he could have written it. D-503's emotions are shown through the use of ellipses. In the beginning there are not many ellipses, they only show up once in a while, but when D-503 starts to develop a soul they occur more often. Because D-503 begins to feel emotions such as love and jealousy; also D-503 begins to think in a more philosophical way, before he only thought scientifically. The ellipses allow the reader to feel the emotions as if they were their own, instead of just reading print on a piece of paper. Also the ellipses allow the reader to fill in the blank of what D-503 is feeling, for example:

"But the elevator was already humming down, down, down... She had taken R from me. She has taken O from me. And yet... And yet..." (Zamyatin 77). 

The ellipses allow much more raw emotion than a description of D-503's emotions would. It is easy to know what d-503 is feeling while he says, "And yet... And yet...". D-503 is realizing that he loves I-330 even if she has taken everything from him. 

"But fortunately, between me and the wild green ocean was the glass wall. O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! It is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall. Man ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that Wall, we isolated out perfect machine world from the irrational ugly world of trees , birds, abd animals..." (Zamyatin 90-91). 

 This is one of my favorite quotes in the novel We. The Green wall separates the city from the outside, or the "savage" world. Keeping pristine scientific, mathematical thought inside and philosophical, questioning thought outside. In this quote the Green Wall reminded me of the wall that the society put up in their own minds so they only have rigid, unfeeling, scientific thought, not natural thought. And this wall is only brought down when they cross over the Green Wall and see the beauty of nature through their own eyes. When D-503 crosses over the Green Wall with I-330 he sees nature and the beauty of the world and that unleashes deeper thoughts, he starts thinking more poetically and less scientifically. D-503 realizes that just because he does not understand something or because there is no one definite answer, it is not irrational. D-503 realizes when he crosses over into the wild beyond the wall that the Green Wall does not keep out the unneeded from OneState, it keeps everyone in from the freedom of thought outside OneState.


I  like We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, I like the growth of D-503's emotions and soul, it irritated me when he followed the many rules of the society without complaint. When he started to break away from conformity I practically did a happy dance. Tthroughout the novel I had mixed feelings about I-330, in the beginning I did not like her, she seemed like someone who was dangerous, like she was just out there to hurt people. But then as I got to know her i started to like her because she was the leader of a group of people standing up for freedom. I also liked the stream of consciousness style of writing, it is a little hard to understand what D-503 is talking about sometimes but it is a really interesting style of writing. I also liked the people who lived outside the Green Wall, it was a little bit odd to find out that they were furry humans, but it seemed to me that the hair symbolized that they are the closest to nature, or the beings with the most freedom. their thoughts are not strangled by the tyrannous society on the other side of the wall. One thing that I did not like was D-503's constant reference to math, it annoyed me that he would compare people to irrational numbers, people are not unchanging numbers, people change and grow, also some of his references to math confused me.