Examining Zamyatin's WE

The Quantified
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s WE is a dystopian novel about testing the allegiance of D-503 (the protagonist) to the One State (a collective group who have mathematically perfected a state of logical and calculated utopianism). D-503 vacillates between mathematically sound reason and a stream-of-conscious dream state; therefore, he must
be definitively corrected by the One State.

Hazrat Inayat Khan, a respected Sufi teacher, once said, “Reason is the illusion of reality (1).” The novel WE attempts to apply calculus to all things—everything is set in rational-derived boundaries. However, Zamyatin suggests in his novel that reason is a counterfeit of life, and this challenges readers to examine their lives in the contemporary context of their day as well. Today, we are so constrained to calculus boundaries that we operate with the suggestion of freedom, but in reality are living in the confines of the calculus; we are like the children at the amusement parks who think they are really driving, but instead are on a calculated track.

Zamyatin orchestrates the alpha-numeric existence of D-503. Everything in the life of D-503 is categorized. As readers, we see this as something bizarre, but we are not so far removed from living a categorized existence that is alpha-numerically bound. “Gods have become like us, ergo, we have become like gods. And to you, my unknown planetary readers, we will come to you, to make your life as divinely rational and exact as ours” (Zamyatin 61). We are becoming slaves to our exacting human proclivity to numerics.

Moreover, as a culture, we are increasingly operating according to alpha-numerics: student ID numbers define us at university; we bank according to a series of alphabetic and numeric combinations; and we have alpha-numeric combinations for virtually everything in life. No longer are we asked to give our names when calling a help-line, insurance billing department, or when making frequent-flyer airline reservations—we are becoming a calculus-based entity.

Numbers are inert. They neither do nor can generate entropy or energy. “So there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One tends toward blissful peace, to happy equilibrium, and the other toward destruction of equilibrium, toward torturously constant movement” (Zamyatin 144). This adherence to the inertia of calculus was D-503’s demise of the soul and his subsequent counterfeit life. Through his prose, Zamyatin warns the reader of a subtle attack of dehumanizing by numbers that he saw evident in his day (before the computer age). It would be interesting to hear his thoughts of our present day culture if he were alive today. Would our subjugation to being a number (as a matter of ease and efficiency) surprise him? How would he classify the current generation? Zamyatin would identify the modern reader more with the ciphers than the planet-dwellers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Zamyatin, Yevgeny. WE, 1921. New York: Modern Library, 2006.
(1) “Sufi Order International.” An Interfaith Ap
proach to Spiritual Growth. 23 April 2007. http://www.sufiorder.toronto.on.ca/ .