Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 8: The Egoist (Part 3) - The Rescue
The government has John Galt. They have him locked in the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel with armed guards outside the door. They have all the guns and all the power and all the television cameras. And they have absolutely no idea what to do with him.
This final stretch of Chapter 8 is basically the looters throwing everything they have at one calm man in a chair, and bouncing off like tennis balls hitting a concrete wall.
The Parade of Failures
Mr. Thompson tries bribery. Mouch tries begging. Chick Morrison shows up with petitions from ten thousand schoolchildren, crippled veterans, ministers of two hundred faiths. He dumps a pile of emotional ammunition on the table. Galt doesn’t touch it. Morrison starts babbling about pity for the weak and helpless. Galt’s face goes hard and he says one word: “Hank Rearden.” Did these people feel any pity for Rearden? Morrison starts to explain why that’s different and Galt says: “Shut up.”
It’s satisfying. I’ll admit that.
Then comes Dr. Ferris with his grand move. He suggests a directive: kill every third child under ten and every third adult over sixty, to save food for the rest. And if Galt refuses to cooperate and this happens, it’s Galt’s moral responsibility. This is the “sins of omission” argument taken to its logical extreme. Even Mr. Thompson, who is no philosopher, screams at Ferris and throws him out of the room.
What I find interesting is how accurately Rand captures the escalation pattern. When you can’t persuade someone with reason, you try emotion. When emotion fails, you try guilt. When guilt fails, you try threats. And when threats fail, you find yourself saying things so monstrous that even your own side recoils. I saw this pattern in academic politics more than once. The stakes were smaller, but the structure was identical.
Dagny’s Double Game
Meanwhile, Dagny is playing a dangerous game. She’s convinced Thompson that she hates Galt, that she trapped him for the reward money, that she’s on their side. She collects the five-hundred-thousand-dollar check and feels nothing. Not guilt, not triumph, not anything. The check is just paper.
What makes this section painful to read is Dagny’s internal state. She’s inhabiting a world where words don’t mean anything. She tells Thompson that Galt is “an arrogant egoist” and “an ambitious adventurer” and each word tastes like rubber in her mouth. She used to treat language as a tool of honor, always as if she were under oath. Now she’s just making sounds for an audience of panic-bleary eyes.
But underneath all the performance, one thing burns like a wire: keep him alive. That’s the only thing that matters. She advises Thompson to send Galt the confidential reports about the country’s collapse. She tells him Galt will eventually give in. She says whatever keeps the guns pointed away from him for one more day.
And then she comes home to find a note slipped under her door. Francisco’s handwriting. “Sit tight. Watch them. When he’ll need our help, call me at OR 6-5693. F.”
That note is the most comforting thing in the entire chapter.
Eddie Willers Says Goodbye
There’s a quiet scene with Eddie Willers that hit me harder than anything else in this section. The Taggart Bridge on the Mississippi has been attacked. San Francisco’s terminal has been seized by one of the fighting factions. Eddie tells Dagny he’s going to fly to California to try to hold things together.
She tells him not to go, that it’s pointless, that there’s nothing left to save. He says: “It’s still Taggart Transcontinental. I’ll stand by it.” And then he tells her something that’s been obvious for a thousand pages but that neither of them has ever said out loud: “Dagny… did you know… how I felt about you?”
“Yes,” she says softly. “I knew it.”
And he walks out. The rumble of an underground train swallows the sound of the door closing.
I’ve always found Eddie Willers the most human character in this book. He’s not a genius inventor or a railroad baron or a philosopher king. He’s just a man who does his job and loves someone who will never love him back and keeps going. When everything is collapsing around him, his impulse is to fly across the country to try to fix one more broken terminal. He’s the kind of guy who goes down with the ship, not because he’s heroic, but because he genuinely can’t imagine doing anything else.
Stadler’s Confession
Dr. Robert Stadler gets marched into Galt’s room by Morale Conditioning goons. He had spent the night before screaming that he couldn’t face Galt, that they couldn’t make him. They gave him orders. He obeyed.
When he sees Galt sitting on the window sill, the image merges with a memory from twenty-two years ago: a boy on a porch railing at Patrick Henry University, and Stadler’s own voice saying “The only sacred value in the world, John, is the human mind, the inviolate human mind…”
And then Stadler breaks down. Completely. He delivers a monologue that is half confession, half excuse, half accusation. He blames the looters. He blames the world. He says reason is useless against force. He says he had no choice but to make deals with them. He says the gun he helped build wasn’t aimed at men like Galt. He says he needed a laboratory. He says the mind is helpless against mindless hordes.
And through this entire rant, Galt sits perfectly still and says nothing. Until the very end, when Stadler’s own words spiral into declaring that Galt must be destroyed. Stadler hears himself and is horrified. He moans “No!” over and over. And Galt finally speaks: “You have said everything I wanted to say to you.”
Stadler runs from the room.
That scene is brutal. Because Stadler isn’t wrong about everything. The world is full of people who don’t think. Force does beat reason in the short term. A scientist really does need funding. But each true observation became a stepping stone toward a complete surrender, and by the end, the man who once worshipped the human mind is calling for its destruction. Rand is making a point about how compromises compound. You make one deal with the devil, and twenty years later you’re banging on the door screaming to be let out of a room where you just told your best student he has to die.
The Banquet
The climax of the chapter is a grand televised dinner. Five hundred guests. Blazing chandeliers. Television cameras. They dress Galt in a tuxedo at gunpoint and parade him in front of the nation. Chick Morrison calls it “The John Galt Plan for Peace, Prosperity and Profit.” Wesley Mouch promises it will “protect the property of the rich and give a greater share to the poor” and “lower prices and raise wages.” Both at once. Sure.
Dagny watches from a side table, torn between happiness at seeing Galt’s face and terror at what they might do. She notices how the crowd reacts: some with blank indifference, some with a desperate admiration they won’t act on, and a few with actual hatred. The hatred is directed at Galt’s face. At his clarity. At the fact that he looks like a man who knows who he is.
Then Mr. Thompson gets to his big moment. He gives a folksy speech about how Galt has joined them of “his own free choice” and tells the audience they’re about to hear Galt’s own message. The camera turns to Galt. He stands up, fast enough to expose the gun pressed against his ribs, and says five words to the entire country:
“Get the hell out of my way!”
That’s how the chapter ends. And honestly, after 1,168 pages of watching people beg him, threaten him, reason with him, flatter him, and try to guilt-trip him with petitions from schoolchildren, it is the most satisfying sentence in the entire book.
The stage is set. The looters have shown the world that they hold Galt prisoner. Galt has shown the world exactly what he thinks of them. And somewhere out there, Francisco is waiting by a phone. Chapter 9 is going to get loud.
Previous: Part III, Chapter 8: The Egoist (Part 2)
Next: Part III, Chapter 9: The Generator
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.