Greg Salmieri and Ben Bayer discuss the following questions for Part II, Chapter 9, of Atlas Shrugged: “The Face Without Pain or Fear or Guilt.”
- Question 1: At the beginning of II.9, Dagny looks out from her apartment at a city that seems to be sinking into the fog. How do her thoughts on this occasion relate to her thoughts early that same morning when she looked out the door of her cabin (II.8), and to her thoughts on the night she looked out the window of the office of the John Galt Line (I.8)?
- Question 2: What is the nature of the disagreement between Dagny and Francisco? Why does each think that the other has betrayed “the kind of man who is what we were when we started”?
- Question 3: What is the significance of the encounter between Francisco and Rearden in Dagny’s apartment, for each of the three of them? What is the evidence for this?
- Question 4: In II.7 and II.8, we saw Francisco’s, Dagny’s and Ragnar’s respective reasons for not wanting to work in the present society. How do Quentin Daniels’s reasons for wanting to quit compare to their reasons?
- Question 5: What do we know from earlier chapters about Eddie’s relationship to the worker and about the worker himself? What more do we learn from their encounter in II.9?
- Question 6: What other questions or observations do you have about Part II, Chapter 9?
For additional information on the course, explore the Resources page.
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