Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 1: Atlantis (Part 1) - Welcome to A Is A
We’re in Part III now. The title of this final section is “A Is A,” which is the law of identity from Aristotle’s logic. The thing is what it is. No contradictions, no pretending, no fake compromises. After two parts of watching the world fall apart under the weight of its own lies, we’re about to see what it looks like when people stop lying.
And it starts with Dagny waking up in a place she didn’t know existed.
She Opens Her Eyes
Remember the end of Part II? Dagny was chasing a plane, trying to reach Quentin Daniels before the mysterious “destroyer” got to him first. She followed the plane into the mountains of Colorado, dropped too low, hit something that killed her engine, and crashed.
Now she opens her eyes. She sees sunlight, green leaves, and a man’s face. And her first thought is: “But of course.” Like she’s arrived somewhere she always knew was waiting for her. Like everything before this moment was just a delay.
The man kneeling beside her has a face that Rand describes in almost ridiculous detail. No marks of pain, fear, or guilt. Eyes like dark green metal. Skin like an aluminum-copper alloy. Hair between brown and gold. He looks like a foundry casting that someone forgot to make dull. And he’s looking at her like he’s been waiting too.
She whispers, “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?”
He answers, “No, we never had to.”
And then she realizes she has no idea who this man is.
“What is your name?”
“John Galt.”
That’s it. That’s the reveal. After hundreds of pages of “Who is John Galt?” being used as a throwaway expression for hopelessness, here he is. A real person. Sitting in the grass next to a crashed airplane.
The Valley
Dagny is hurt. Torn cartilage in two ribs, a sprained ankle, cuts and bruises. She can’t walk. So Galt picks her up and carries her down a trail into the valley.
Let me just say, Rand really knows how to build a scene. As Galt carries Dagny down the mountain, she hears music. Specifically, she hears Halley’s Fifth Concerto. The same piece she heard once on a night train, the one that nobody in the outside world has ever heard because Richard Halley supposedly never wrote a fifth concerto.
“That’s the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, isn’t it?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“When did he write it?”
“Why don’t you ask him in person?”
He’s here. Living in a small house on a ledge. Playing his music. The composer who vanished from the world is right there, and Galt says it like it’s the most natural thing ever.
Then the trail turns and Dagny sees the town. A cluster of small houses scattered across the valley floor, some industrial structures in the distance, mountains encircling everything. And rising above it all on a granite column, catching the sun, is a golden dollar sign three feet tall.
“What’s that?” she gasps.
“Oh, that’s Francisco’s private joke.”
Francisco d’Anconia is here too. Of course he is.
The Welcome Committee
Two men come hurrying up the trail. One is Hugh Akston, the philosopher she met at a roadside diner who was flipping hamburgers. The other is Midas Mulligan, the banker who vanished years ago after refusing to make loans to people who couldn’t pay them back.
Akston greets her with a line that made me laugh: “Miss Taggart, this is the first time anyone has ever proved me wrong. I didn’t know, when I told you you’d never find him, that the next time I saw you, you would be in his arms.”
Then he adds: “The inventor of the motor.”
And that’s connection number two clicking into place. John Galt is the man who invented the revolutionary motor that Dagny found abandoned in a factory. The motor that could have changed the world. He built it, and then he walked away from it.
Mulligan calls Dagny “the first scab,” which is a strike term for someone who crosses the picket line. Because that’s what this is. A strike. The producers of the world are on strike, and they’re all here, in this valley, living on their own terms.
Galt says he’ll take responsibility for Dagny. Mulligan has already taken charge of Quentin Daniels, who arrived with Galt and is apparently in a state of total euphoria.
Galt’s House
Galt carries Dagny to his house. It’s simple. Rough granite walls, polished pine, handmade furniture, bare rafters. But there’s a chromium electric stove in the kitchen. That contrast matters. This is a frontier cabin built by someone with access to technology the outside world doesn’t have.
Dr. Thomas Hendricks shows up to treat her injuries. Yes, the famous surgeon who vanished six years ago. He patches her up with a portable X-ray machine and tells her to rest. She says she can’t possibly rest. He agrees.
Galt makes breakfast. Eggs, bacon, toast, orange juice, coffee. And when she asks where the food comes from, the answer is something else. The grocery store is run by Lawrence Hammond, of Hammond Cars. The bacon comes from Dwight Sanders’ farm. Sanders, the aircraft manufacturer. The eggs and butter come from Judge Narragansett’s dairy farm.
“It’s the most expensive breakfast I’ll ever eat,” she says, “considering the value of the cook’s time and of all those others.”
Galt’s response: “But from another aspect, it’s the cheapest breakfast you’ll ever eat, because no part of it has gone to feed the looters.”
There’s something about that line that sticks. Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I watched a system where half of everything produced went to feed a bureaucracy that produced nothing. People joked about it, but it wasn’t funny. The idea that you could eat a meal where every part of it was honestly earned and honestly traded, with zero going to parasites, that’s not just philosophy. That’s a fantasy a lot of people have had.
The Rules of the Valley
The word “give” is forbidden here. When Dagny suggests that Mulligan could lend his car as a courtesy, Galt stops her. In this valley, everything is traded. Mulligan charges twenty-five cents to rent his car for the day. It sounds absurd for a man worth two hundred million dollars. But that’s the point. The principle matters more than the amount.
Quentin Daniels bursts in, breathless and guilty. He broke his promise to Dagny. He was supposed to wait for her. Instead, Galt showed up at his laboratory, swept his blackboard clean, wrote one equation, and revealed himself as the inventor of the motor. Daniels forgot everything else. He forgot his promise, forgot the outside world, forgot his own name practically. He just followed Galt.
“I would have leaped off a skyscraper just to follow him,” Daniels says, “and to hear his formula before we hit the pavement.”
I believe him. When you’ve been working on an impossible problem for months and someone walks in and shows you the answer in one line, you don’t stop to check your calendar.
The Tour
Galt drives Dagny around the valley. Every stop is another vanished person from the outside world. Dwight Sanders, the aircraft manufacturer, is now a hog farmer and airfield attendant. But he still has his skills. He designed one tractor by hand, and it cut the workday in half across multiple farms. Dick McNamara, Dagny’s former contractor, runs the water and power lines. His crew is three professors who couldn’t get jobs because they taught unfashionable truths.
Ellis Wyatt is extracting oil from shale with a process nobody thought was possible. Two hundred barrels a day. When Dagny points out he could be producing trainloads, he holds up a greasy finger and says: “Mine. Every single drop of it.”
His philosophy of wealth hit me harder than most of the speeches in this book. Wealth, he says, is the means of expanding your life. You expand it by producing more or producing faster. Every hour he saves through better methods is an hour added to his life. “I’m manufacturing time,” he says. And in this valley, nobody takes that time away from him.
The young brakeman from the Comet is here too. Working for Wyatt now, studying music with Richard Halley. Even the truck driver roughneck working the oil pumps turns out to be exactly what he looks like, a truck driver, but one who wanted to become something more and couldn’t in the outside world.
I’ll cover the rest of the tour and the dinner at Mulligan’s in Part 2. But already, this chapter is doing something the rest of the book only hinted at. It’s showing, not just arguing, what a society built on voluntary trade and honest work might actually look like. Small, yes. Hidden, yes. But functional. And populated entirely by people who refused to let the world use their talents against them.
Previous: Part II, Chapter 10: The Sign of the Dollar (Part 2)
Next: Part III, Chapter 1: Atlantis (Part 2)
This is part of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (35th Anniversary Edition, ISBN: 978-1-101-13719-2). New posts daily.