Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 4: Anti-Life (Part 2) - Rearden Finally Sees the Truth

This second half of “Anti-Life” is one of the darkest stretches of the entire novel. But it starts with light. Rearden finally gets it. And that makes everything else in this chapter hit even harder.

Rearden’s Declaration

Dagny comes home from her radio broadcast to find Rearden waiting in her apartment. He heard the whole thing. And instead of the broken, tortured man she expected, she finds someone who looks like he aged ten years in the best possible way. Calm. Clear. Certain.

He tells her to sit down and listen.

What follows is Rearden’s confession and liberation rolled into one. He tells Dagny he loves her. Not as a guilty secret anymore. He loves her the same way he loves his work, his mills, his Metal. And he finally says out loud what Francisco had been trying to tell him for years: the mind-body split that the mystics preach is the weapon the looters used to destroy him.

He fought them on the price of steel but accepted their verdict on the value of happiness. He refused to let them dictate what his metal was worth but let them dictate what his love was worth. He hid his relationship with Dagny like a crime, and that lie gave them the power to use it against both of them.

Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I recognized this pattern instantly. The system never needed to chain your hands. It just needed you to feel guilty about wanting something better. Once you accepted that guilt, you policed yourself. Rearden finally sees it. He spent his entire life fighting the looters in the boardroom while surrendering to them in his soul.

Then the surprising part. He tells Dagny he knows she met someone else. He figured it out from her broadcast: she used past tense. “I wanted him,” not “I love him.” And Rearden, the man who once slapped Francisco for being in Dagny’s apartment, simply accepts it. With clarity, not resignation. He says his love for her is unchanged and that he’s happy because he finally sees the truth.

This is a completely different Rearden from Part I. The man who tortured himself over every feeling is gone. What replaced him is someone who looks like the men in the valley. Francisco’s work is done, even if Francisco doesn’t know it yet.

Cherryl Goes to Dagny

After the Rearden scene, the chapter takes a hard turn. Cherryl Taggart shows up at Dagny’s apartment to apologize for the insults she threw at her during the wedding. She’s figured out the truth: Dagny was the real force behind Taggart Transcontinental. Jim is some kind of parasite she can’t fully name yet.

Dagny forgives her immediately. And then something beautiful happens. They talk. Really talk. Dagny explains that when people call someone “unfeeling,” they mean that person is just, that they won’t hand out emotions that haven’t been earned. Cherryl almost breaks down because this is exactly what she’s been struggling to understand for months.

Cherryl describes her world dissolving into jelly. Nothing is solid. The people around her shift and lie and contradict themselves. Dagny tells her: hold onto your own judgment. What is, is. Your instinct to value your own life is the highest good on earth. Cherryl almost believes it. Almost.

Dagny asks her to stay the night. Cherryl refuses. She promises to come back. She walks away down the hallway, and Rand describes her like a plant with a broken stem, still held together by a single fiber.

Jim and Lillian

While Cherryl was at Dagny’s, Jim was sulking alone in his apartment. Then Lillian Rearden shows up. She’s desperate. Rearden is divorcing her, and he’s bought every judge and clerk needed to make it happen. She wants Jim to use his connections to stop it.

Jim can’t help her. Or won’t. The system of favors and gopher-hole politics has gotten so tangled that nobody will lift a finger unless the stakes are life and death. Lillian’s marriage doesn’t qualify.

What happens next is one of the ugliest scenes Rand ever wrote. They bond over shared hatred of the people who are better than them. Lillian talks about Rearden’s pride, his fearlessness, how he treated everything he touched as sacred. She can’t build what he builds. But she can destroy it. That’s her power.

They end up in bed together. Not out of desire. Out of spite. Jim says “Mrs. Rearden” as the only words between them. Rand describes it as “an act in celebration of the triumph of impotence.” These two people use intimacy as a weapon against someone who isn’t even in the room. It’s not passion. It’s vandalism.

Cherryl’s End

Cherryl comes home and finds the evidence. A woman’s hat on the floor. Two glasses. Voices behind a closed door. She retreats to her room in horror.

When Jim finds her, she tells him she knows. And Jim explodes. He’s proud of it. He screams at her that he’ll do whatever he wants and she can shut up about it. Then the conversation turns into something much worse. Cherryl asks why he married her.

Jim tells the truth, maybe for the first time in his life. He married her because she was a nobody. Because she was poor and helpless and would have to be grateful forever. Because he wanted love as alms, not something earned. He wanted a wife who would never dare judge him.

But Cherryl pins him. She says: those other girls, the ones you could buy for a meal, they would have accepted the gutter. You didn’t marry them. You married me because I was trying to rise. And Jim admits it. Yes.

And that’s when Cherryl sees what Jim really is. Not a parasite. Something worse. A killer for the sake of killing. Someone who specifically seeks out the good in order to destroy it. Not for profit. For the pleasure of destruction itself.

Jim hits her. She runs.

The final pages follow Cherryl through the streets of New York at night. She sees the skyscrapers as tombstones. She passes a “Young Women’s Rest Club” and knows they would only ask about her guilt, never about the pain of the innocent. She ends up on a dark street near the river.

A social worker grabs her arm and lectures her about selfishness and living for pleasure.

Cherryl screams: “No! Not your kind of world!” And she runs, straight down the street, past the stone wall at the edge, and into the river.

I had to put the book down after this. Rand doesn’t soften it. There is no rescue. Cherryl dies because the world punished her for being good, and she had no one left who could explain to her, in time, why it was worth fighting through.

The chapter is called “Anti-Life.” Now you know why.

Previous: Part III, Chapter 4: Anti-Life (Part 1)

Next: Part III, Chapter 5: Their Brothers’ Keepers (Part 1)

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.