PLOT
The morning after Dagny and Hank have sex, they discuss what it meant to each of them. Hank and Dagny meet that night at Dagny’s place. On September 2, Hank goes to a dinner in his honor given by the National Council of Metal Industries and then Hank decides he and Dagny should take a few weeks of vacation. While on vacation, they decide to find the 20th Century Motor Company in order to get machines for Ted Nielsen who has agreed to make Dagny’s engines. The 20th Century Motor Company is deserted except for the remnants of a motor that was able to turn static energy into kinetic energy.
SUBPLOT (loose ends)
Ragnar strikes a ship with Emergency Gift cargo headed for Norway.
James "celebrates" the victory of the John Galt Line by bringing a dime store clerk up to his room. He decides not to have sex with Cherryl Brooks.
Hank wants to know the other man Dagny has been with.
Mr. Mowen fumes about the unfairness of business conditions to a day laborer, Owen Kellogg.
The Legislature passed a Bill giving wider powers to the Bureau of Economic Planning and Natural Resources.
COMMENTS
Scale – Cherryl is hard to pin down. She talks like the positive side of the scale, but her seeming lack of intelligence allows James to convince her about the negative side. We learn more about Jim...just like we learned about Hank, Dagny, and Francisco: "He did not name to himself the nature of his own feeling - never to identify his emotions was the only steadfast rule of his life; he merely felt it..." "The unnamed and the unuttered could not clash into a contradiction." "...unhappiness is the hallmark of virtue. If a man is unhappy, really, truly unhappy, it means that he is a superior sort of person." James is moving beyond –6 with his responses to all that the positive side accomplishes. He is becoming more emotionally unstable.
Story Arc - Dagny sees the calendar says it is September 2...one year has passed since the beginning of the book...and we have completed the story arc begun at the beginning of the book concerning the Rio Norte Line. At the beginning, Dagny needs to replace the Rio Norte Line...during this chapter the John Galt Line is renamed the Rio Norte Line. The rest of the chapter sets up the next story arc...Dagny and Hank go on a vacation and find the remnants of a revolutionary motor in the abandoned Twentieth Century Motor Company headquarters in Wisconsin.
Dagny – Dagny’s handling of her affair with Hank actually shows she’s more positive than Hank. Hank’s belief in ownership AND sex being a base need leads to him feeling guilty about the affair. Hank does not do things half way. "He (Hank) was incapable of halfway concerns." So now Hank resents Dagny for making him have to lie about an aspect of his life. "What I feel for you is contempt. But it is nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved anyone." Dagny says she doesn’t feel guilty about it. Let’s put Dagny at +6.5.
Absolutes – "There are no absolutes – as Dr. Pritchett has proved irrefutably. Nothing is absolute. Everything is a matter of opinion." (James to Cherryl) The inability to communicate without using absolutes proves the existence of absolutes.
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