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Part 1, Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Atlas Shrugged, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Morality of Self-Interest
The Value of Productive Work
The Individual vs. the Collective
Government Power and Corruption
The Corruption of Language
Despair in the Absence of Purpose
Summary
Analysis
Dagny arrives at the ruins of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, determined to trace the origin of the experimental motor she believes could transform the world. The factory stands silent and empty, a ghost of its former self. She walks through crumbling rooms and quiet corridors, searching for records, designs, or names that might lead her to the motor’s creator. Most of the documents have been destroyed in fires or discarded. What little remains offers no real guidance—only fragments or deliberately obscure notes. Dagny questions several locals, but none of them provides useful answers. Some shrug indifferently, while others recount vague, half-forgotten stories about former owners, shady investors, and engineers who disappeared without explanation.
Dagny’s return to the factory captures the emotional atmosphere of a graveyard. The silence, the missing records, and the locals’ indifference combine to form a kind of anti-memory—a deliberate erasure of genius. Her journey through this decaying space is an attempt at moral excavation: she’s not just looking for a machine, but for the idea of uncorrupted creation. The factory’s emptiness reinforces the novel’s insistence that unprotected talent disappears not through conflict, but through decay and silence.
Themes
Dagny learns that after the factory closed, it changed hands several times. A man named Mark Yonts dismantled the operation, sold off every valuable machine, and disappeared. A former mayor named Bascom briefly held the deed but used it only to secure personal profit through minor property deals. Neither man offers any information about the motor or its inventor. Everyone Dagny questions appears either evasive or apathetic. Some refuse to speak plainly, while others show no interest in the remarkable work that once took place inside the factory. Dagny refuses to stop. She continues her search, determined to find someone who still remembers the people who built the motor.
The repeated evasion Dagny encounters illustrates how society covers up its own betrayals. Those who inherited or dismantled the factory are not explicit villains but rather hollow opportunists or passive caretakers of decline. Neither Yonts nor Bascom destroys the factory out of malice, but by neglect and indifference. Dagny’s persistence in the face of apathy sets her apart as one of the few still capable of grasping the value of what’s been lost.
Themes
Dagny follows a lead that points to Midas Mulligan, a powerful banker who vanished years earlier. People speak his name with a mix of bitterness and respect. Mulligan built his reputation by supporting bold, independent men with ambitious ideas. He disappeared abruptly after a court order demanded that he loan money to a man who clearly lacked the means to repay it. Mulligan refused, closed his bank, and vanished. No one knows where he went.
Midas Mulligan’s story adds a new dimension to the pattern Dagny has begun to map. His vanished bank becomes the financial version of Hank’s stripped steel empire or the gutted factory. That his name survives only in rumors suggests that competence, when withdrawn, becomes legend. Mulligan’s exit is an escape from a world that no longer allows justice.
Themes
To Dagny, Mulligan’s disappearance fits a pattern she has begun to recognize—productive, talented individuals walking away from society without warning. The same pattern applies to the Starnes heirs, children of the factory’s founder. After Jed Starnes died, they inherited the business and replaced it with a collectivist system: each worker would receive according to his need, rather than his output. Morale collapsed, output dwindled, and the factory closed its doors.
The collectivist system introduced by the Starnes heirs reveals what happens when need replaces effort as the standard of value. The moral rot spreads faster than technical failure. Workers, knowing their labor will not change their reward, cease to produce—not out of rebellion, but from resignation. The factory does not collapse because of sabotage—it dies because belief in personal agency dies.
Themes
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Dagny visits Ivy Starnes, the last of the heirs, and finds her living in a decaying house filled with incense, political trinkets, and bitter slogans painted on the walls. Ivy defends the collectivist system and blames its failure on the moral weakness of others. She refuses to acknowledge any flaws in the system and offers Dagny no useful information. Dagny turns to the engineers who once worked at the factory and eventually uncovers a name—William Hastings, the former chief engineer.
Ivy Starnes represents the endpoint of ideological denial. Her incense, slogans, and empty rhetoric form a ritualistic defense against responsibility. She cannot admit that her system failed because admitting failure would destroy her identity. The absence of information she offers isn’t accidental; it’s a reflection of her belief that the truth doesn’t matter.
Themes
Hastings had admired a brilliant young assistant who, according to rumor, built the experimental motor. When the Starnes heirs imposed the new work system, Hastings resigned in protest. He took nothing with him, left behind no documents, and refused to speak of the motor again. Dagny tracks down his widow, who remembers him warmly but cannot recall the assistant’s name. However, she mentions a man Hastings once dined with and suggests Dagny try to find him.
William Hastings provides the final connection to the vanished inventor, and his silent resignation reflects the deeper motif of quiet withdrawal. Hastings doesn’t argue or protest—he simply leaves, taking his loyalty with him. His refusal to speak of the motor again suggests a protective instinct: he shields what’s valuable from those who would corrupt it.
Themes
That single lead takes Dagny into the mountains of Wyoming, near the site of the Lennox Copper Foundry. She stops at a roadside diner for a meal and notices the cook moving with sharp precision. He prepares each dish with the focused care of a surgeon. Over time, she realizes that the cook is Hugh Akston, once a renowned philosopher and respected university professor. Dagny feels shocked that a man of his stature would choose such to live in obscurity. She questions him, hoping to uncover what he knows.
Hugh Akston’s transformation from philosopher to cook flips the traditional hierarchy. He chooses a job requiring focus and precision over one involving empty prestige. His decision to disappear into obscurity challenges the idea that visibility equals value. The world’s greatest thinkers are no longer shaping policy or education. They are making breakfast because nothing else deserves their effort.
Themes
Akston admits that he knows the inventor of the motor, but he refuses to share the name. He explains that the man Dagny is looking for has no desire to be found. Akston promises that she will understand one day, but not yet. Then, he gives her a cigarette with a dollar sign stamped on it. Frustrated, Dagny leaves the diner feeling more certain than ever that she is close to the truth.
Akston’s refusal to name the inventor deepens the mystery without making it feel evasive. He acknowledges Dagny’s intelligence but tells her she’s not ready—implying that finding the inventor requires more than inquiry. The cigarette with the dollar sign becomes a symbol of a hidden network operating beneath the surface. Akston’s respect for Dagny is clear, but so is his conviction that access must be earned through understanding, not urgency.
Themes
On her return trip to New York, Dagny boards a train and reads a newspaper she picks up onboard. The headlines report new government directives: railroads must reduce train speeds, limit cargo weight, and follow fixed pricing. Steel production now faces strict caps. The government has also imposed special taxes on Colorado businesses. As she reads, Dagny realizes that Wyatt—whose oil fields power much of the nation—is now under direct attack. She tries to call him, but no one answers. She knows with certainty that Wyatt will not accept these restrictions without taking drastic action.
The escalating government restrictions confirm that collapse is now systemic and targeted. The attack on Wyatt is strategic. The state no longer tolerates independence, especially in Colorado, the last functioning region of industry. However, as Dagny’s urgency suggests, Wyatt is not someone who will just stand by and take this abuse. He is willing to take drastic measures and Dagny wants to reach him before he can do anything too radical.
Themes
As Dagny’s train approaches the Colorado line, passengers notice a strange orange glow spreading across the mountains. Flames rise in the distance. The train comes to a stop, and Dagny rushes to the station. There, she confirms what she feared—Ellis Wyatt has set fire to his oil wells. A note remains behind in his office: he is leaving and has returned the land to the state in which he found it. Dagny stands still, watching the fires consume the hills. The most essential oil supply in the nation has vanished—destroyed by the man who built it.
Wyatt’s decision to torch his wells is the novel’s boldest act of defiance so far. He will not let others profit from his labor if they have outlawed the terms of value that made it possible. His note, like Francisco’s riddles and Mulligan’s disappearance, serves as a statement: if society denies justice, then justice will leave. Here, Dagny sees, for the first time, the full cost of society’s war on competence.
Themes
Smoke pours into the sky as Dagny boards the train once more. She understands that this event will ripple across every industry dependent on Wyatt’s oil. The consequences will be devastating. And yet, she cannot bring herself to blame him. One by one, the country’s most capable individuals are vanishing. Some disappear in silence. Others, like Wyatt, leave behind one final act. To Dagny, Akston’s guarded silence, Mulligan’s disappearance, and Hastings’s quiet exit all feel connected. But Dagny cannot yet see how the pieces fit.
The spreading fires and vanishing oil stand as metaphors for the rapid unraveling of civilization. Dagny’s realization that she cannot blame Wyatt speaks volumes: she’s no longer trying to save the system as it is. Her mind is turning toward the underlying logic that connects these disappearances. The motor, the missing people, and the dollar-sign cigarette all belong to a counter-world—one still hidden but taking shape in the shadows. She’s on the edge of a discovery that may force her to question the foundation of everything she’s tried to preserve.
Themes
Back in New York, Dagny returns to work with renewed determination. Bureaucrats and political appointees surround her—men who do not understand the railroad and do not care whether it survives. She focuses on rerouting freight, recovering steel orders, and keeping the trains running. But her thoughts return again and again to the experimental motor buried in the ruins of the factory. Its design remains unmatched. Its promise remains limitless. She feels certain the inventor still lives and that finding him may offer the only hope of stopping the collapse that now spreads across the country.
The contrast between Dagny’s growing insight and the clueless bureaucrats surrounding her sharpens the novel’s moral tension. She continues to work, but her focus is already shifting from reaction to pursuit. The motor becomes a stand-in for the man she hasn’t yet found—whoever he is, he represents the missing piece. The world is falling, and Dagny now sees that only the mind that created that motor might still hold the power to stop it.
Themes
