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Who Is John Galt

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Who Is John Galt
So who is John Galt and what does he represent? Is he the man who begged on the streets of New York or is he some cold, calculating, cut-throat railroad owner? Is he a saint or is he an incarnation of the devil himself? Or is he none of these people! Ayn Rand left a lot of questions unanswered in her literary epic “Atlas Shrugged”.
Some readers would like to find the answer on their own. They are left with a nagging feeling long after they have turned the last page and closed the book with a sigh of either relief (at least the speech is over) or of nostalgia (oh, why did it have to end so soon). I happened to fall in the latter category.
John Galt means different things to different people. To me he is a pillar of strength, a beacon in a storm, a guiding life-force. One of my favourite quotes from the infamously long John Galt speech is “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” At first glance, it might look like it promotes selfish conduct or is even borderline narcissistic. But the beauty of the thought lies in the fact that it embodies the very essence of ‘self’, of existence for the sake of fulfilling ‘your’ purpose. It speaks of giving it your all, of going that extra mile, not because you want to impress or beat somebody, but because you are meant to do it for your ‘own’ sake alone and as if that is your only purpose in life.
Another one of Galt’s powerful quotes is “His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Life is the reward of virtue- and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.” It talks about hedonism as a concept and how the sole purpose of your existence should be to attain a state of happiness. But note that the happiness he talks about can only be achieved through virtue and not by material or physical possessions. This virtue could be anything, love, kindness, empathy or even pride.
The unique quality about Galt as a character is that each reader may have a different take on him and each reader will find himself associating or connecting with a different philosophy propagated by him. If you ask fifty different people what their takeaway was from the book, you might get fifty different perspectives. So if you finish reading the eight-hundred page saga which is “Atlas Shrugged”, and you are left wondering “But wait a minute, who was John Galt”, then Rand’s objective in writing the book is probably fulfilled.

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