It is left to each of us as readers and thinkers to agree or disagree with any of the positions taken in these novels, but it is because all three consider some of the same themes—and because all three are consummate examples of Romantic fiction at its best—that we may compare them to our ultimate benefit. For Hugo, man without God can achieve nobility of character but is trapped in a cruel society. For Dostoyevsky, man without God is a loathsome creature doomed in every conceivable form. But for Ayn Rand, only man without God can achieve nobility or flourishing life. For Hugo, society is malevolent. For Dostoyevsky, human nature is malevolent. For Ayn Rand, religion itself, including the secularization of its tenets in modern philosophy, is malevolent, and she dramatizes this point consistently in Atlas Shrugged.

Atlas tells the story of a man who says he will stop the motor of the world—and does. He operates behind the scenes in the book, giving the story an air of mystery on a global scale. To those, like Dagny Taggart, who suspect his existence, he is a destroyer responsible for the collapse of industrial civilization.

Dagny is the operating vice-president of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad in America. Industrial production is falling sharply due to two causes: the socialist policies of the political leaders and the retirement/disappearance of the country's best minds. To signify the general despair and hopeless resignation pervading the country, people have come to ask the seemingly-rhetorical question: "Who is John Galt?" Dagny works to rebuild the crucial Rio Norte Line as a means of saving the railroad and stemming the decline. She suspects the existence of an active agent working for destruction and, in defiance of the pervasive expectation of doom, re-christens her line the "John Galt Line." In the teeth of unanimous social opposition, she builds the rails not of steel but of Rearden Metal, a new alloy developed by industrialist Hank Rearden. She and Rearden successfully construct the line, then become lovers. On vacation, they find the abandoned wreck of a new motor that would transform the world. Dagny searches unsuccessfully for the inventor, then hires a scientist to attempt the motor's reconstruction. The government issues a decree, binding men to their present jobs. The scientist quits. Dagny flies a small plane to Utah, finds him leaving with the destroyer, flies after them and crashes in the Colorado mountains. She finds herself in a hidden valley—Atlantis—the home of John Galt, the man who is both the motor's inventor and the "destroyer." Here she finds the great producers who have disappeared; they are on strike against the creed of self-sacrifice that enslaves the mind. Although Dagny returns to the railroad, she and John Galt are in love and become lovers. The looting politicians try to take over Rearden's mills; he finally sees the nature of their code and joins the strike. John Galt gives a radio address to the nation, explaining both the existence and nature of the strike, and the conditions for ending it. The looters take Galt prisoner and torture him, attempting to force him to become economic dictator of the country. Galt's allies, now including Dagny, rescue him and return to the valley. With the great minds on strike, the looters' regime collapses. The strikers are free to return to the world.

This is the essence of one-thousand pages of amazingly-complex story line. At this point there is enough information to raise the question: Is there a main character, a hero, whose specific value quest drives the action?

Clearly there is: John Galt. His goal is to successfully complete the strike, to withdraw from the world the men of the mind, to precipitate the collapse of the looters' regime and the creed on which it rests, then to return to the world and rebuild it on the principles of a philosophy recognizing the role of the mind, i.e., a philosophy of reason, individualism and capitalism.

Is there an antagonist(s) who stands in his way? Yes—Dagny and Rearden. The looters are Galt's philosophical enemies, but they survive by force and parasitism, as leeches on the productive effort of the scientists, engineers, and industrialists, among others. When the rational, productive men withdraw, the looters starve; the parasites need individuals like Dagny and Rearden to support them.

One of many bold and original aspects of this book is the good versus good nature of its essential conflict. Although Galt and the strikers are determined to bring down the parasites' regime, the parasites themselves offer no opposition to them; only the non-striking producers, scabs like Dagny and Rearden, can defeat them.

Since this is a novel about a strike, it is possible to understand all of its characters in terms of strike-related categories, which reduce to four: the strikers (Galt and his allies), the scabs (primarily Rearden and Dagny), management (the collectivist politicians and their intellectual supporters), and shareholders (the American people, to whom Galt addresses his radio broadcast). This understanding holds the essence of Ayn Rand's story: the thinkers go on strike against the philosophical/moral code that enslaves them. This is the plot-theme of Atlas Shrugged: the men of the mind go on strike against an altruist-collectivist society. The conflict presents a stark alternative: the men of the mind versus the looters. Just as Hugo shows a fundamental division and conflict between the kind-hearted and the cruel, and Dostoyevsky between the godly and the sinful, so Ayn Rand presents a similar struggle between the men of reason and the men of force, i.e., the rational and the irrational.

Ayn Rand shows vividly what the two sides stand for in action. In the world of the thinkers, John Galt invents a revolutionary new motor; Ellis Wyatt, creates an innovative process for producing oil from shale rock, enabling industrial development in Colorado to skyrocket; Francisco d'Anconia invents a new copper smelter and prodigiously increases the output of d'Anconia Copper; Hank Rearden develops a metal alloy far superior to steel; Dagny Taggart builds new rail lines and runs her railroad expertly. The author's principle is clear: where the mind is free to function, there is creativity, inventiveness, productivity, abundance, prosperity and flourishing life. In contrast is the world of the looters, the force-initiators, in which government bureaucrats like Wesley Mouch, Floyd Ferris, and others pass directives that enable less productive states to suck the life-blood from Colorado, that make it impossible for Hank Rearden to profit from the product of his brains, that establish Railroad and Steel Unification Plans, demanding the producers work at a loss. They chain men to their jobs, shackle their minds by brute force, and ultimately drive the best and the brightest to join the strike. Ultimately, their policies bring collapse.

Again, Rand's principle is clear: where the mind is shackled by force, there is decreasing productivity, shortage, scarcity, decline, demise, destruction and death. She contrasts the results of commitment to the mind's free use with commitment to the mind's enslavement as the plot mechanism to drive home her point: the mind is the source of all values on which human life depends; in its absence there is and can be nothing but poverty, misery and collapse. This leads directly to the novel's theme: the role of the mind in human existence.

The source of wealth, Atlas Shrugged dramatizes, is not manual labor but the mind. In the absence of genius, no amount of muscular effort could create new products like Galt's motor or Rearden Metal. It was the mind that created the electric light, the automobile, the telephone, the airplane. It was the mind that wiped out disease. It was the mind that landed men on the moon, invented weather satellites and supersonic transports, created the computer revolution. Every value on which human life depends is a product of the reasoning mind—from food, which must be grown, requiring knowledge of agricultural technology; to houses, which must be built, requiring knowledge of geometry; to clothing, which must be manufactured, requiring knowledge of chemistry; to medicine, which must be researched and developed, requiring knowledge of biology; to much more. This is the vision of human nature that drives the action in Atlas Shrugged.

In a word, this novel is about survival. Reason is more than the essential distinguishing characteristic that differentiates man from other animals; it is his instrument of survival. It is not merely the case that man cannot prosper without the full, unencumbered exercise of his mind; more fundamentally, he cannot even survive.

If it is asked, "What is Atlas Shrugged really about?" the clearest answer can be provided by contrast with Les Misérables and The Brothers Karamazov. Hugo seeks to re-generate social institutions. Dostoyevsky looks to purify man's nature. What does Ayn Rand attempt to accomplish? She does not hope to transform human nature, like Dostoyevsky; this, she holds, is neither necessary (man's rational capacity is life-giving) nor possible (it is fixed by nature, by reality, and is not open to choice). Certainly Rand, like Hugo, seeks to promote political/social change, but even this goal is neither fundamental nor (in a sense) sweeping. For at the end of Atlas Shrugged, Judge Naragansett revises portions of the United States Constitution, adding the clause that Congress shall make no laws restricting the freedom of production or trade. In so doing, he merely applies the document's fundamental principle of individual rights more consistently in the economic realm. Ayn Rand's point is clear: the original founding principles of the United States are superb, but there have been and remain inconsistencies of application that have enabled the statists to push the country toward dictatorship. These inner contradictions must be deleted and the principle of individual rights affirmed across the board.

But Atlas Shrugged is not about politics. Ayn Rand is after much bigger game. It is an impassioned plea for man to discover and embrace his rational nature. Changes in human nature are neither possible nor necessary, and social/political changes are secondary consequences. Atlas Shrugged is about man's discovery of himself. Ayn Rand, the atheist, has written a religious hymn, an ode to the sacredness of man's life on earth. It glorifies the great and notable deeds already performed by men; more importantly, it sings of the potential lying yet untapped within the human spirit. The book is a sonnet in praise of the discoveries, the inventions, the explorations, the innovations that man can yet achieve, and it exalts the abundance that man could create. Atlas Shrugged is a love poem written to man's mind. This is the core of its meaning.

Having analyzed these three great novels, the question can now be raised: what is the philosophy of Romantic fiction? It has been seen that great Romanticists may be religious, like Hugo or Dostoyevsky, or secular, like Rand. Epistemologically, they may trumpet faith or reason. They may believe man is sinful, like Dostoyevsky, or noble, like Hugo and Rand.

What, therefore, is the distinguishing essence of Romanticism as a school of fiction? By virtue of what principle(s) do we unite such diverse authors into a single category? The unifying thread can be extracted from the three books under study. In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean is confronted through the actions of Bishop Myriel with a simple but gut-wrenching alternative: change your life or wither and die. Throughout his subsequent life he continues to choose among agonizing alternatives in accordance with the man he wants himself to be, e.g., his decision to reveal his identity and save Champmathieu, his decision to rescue Marius and risk losing Cosette. In The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha wrestles with his faith which wavers when Father Zossima's body decomposes quickly; momentarily he chooses hedonistic indulgence, then corrects himself, but still struggles to enact his mentor's principles. Ivan believes that without God there is no morality but balks at the prospect of accepting the injustices in God's world; he agonizes over the choice between God and atheism. Dmitri desires to live an honorable life but persistently chooses ignoble action; he loves God but follows Satan, and lives in subsequent torment. Men make their moral beds, according to Dostoyevsky, then lie in them. They must choose between faith and disbelief. In Atlas Shrugged, man's rational nature is abundantly established, but its acceptance and use is shown to be volitional. Man's survival depends on it, but its functioning is not automatic. James Taggart shares the same rational nature as Dagny—they even share the same gene pool—but Jim is a vicious whim-worshipper and Dagny is scrupulously rational. "Man is a being of self-made soul," says Ayn Rand. And the fundamental choice every human being must make is between rationality and irrationality.

In Les Misérables, man is confronted with a fundamental choice: selfishness or service to humanity. In The Brothers Karamazov, man is confronted with a fundamental choice: God or the devil. In Atlas Shrugged, man is confronted with a fundamental choice: reason or unreason. It becomes clear that the underlying principle forming the essence of Romantic literature is that of free will. Ayn Rand herself states the principle succinctly in The Romantic Manifesto: "Romanticism is a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition."

Contrast this school of literature with that of Naturalism (and others), whose characters are often anti-heroes and depicted as dominated (if not crushed) by external agencies, be they social conditions (as in Theodore Dreiser), God (as in Sophocles) or repressed neuroses and Oedipal urges (as in Eugene O'Neill). The essence of this (in the broadest philosophical sense) Naturalistic school of literature is the principle of determinism, the belief that an individual has no control over the outcome of his life, that he is the plaything of outside forces.

The principle of free will—the belief that human beings control their destiny by virtue of their own choices—is the defining essence of the Romantic school. This has important consequences for the role of morality in the universe of a Romantic novel. Again, to take the three examples one at a time: Hugo wants to transform society in accordance with the principles of Religious Humanism. Dostoyevsky wants to purify man's sinful nature in accordance with the principles of Christianity. Ayn Rand wants to trumpet the full meaning of man's rational nature and transfigure his life on earth in accordance with the principles of her Objectivist philosophy.

For all three authors, since men and women have free will, they choose their values, by commission or omission. If they choose properly, the can transform their life and, in principle, the world. Romantics see the world not merely as it is but as it might be and ought to be. They see past empirical truths all the way down to the deeper metaphysical level of what is proper and possible to humankind. If Romantics don't like the state of the world, they fight to alter it. If they perceive wrong values dominating, they fight for the right ones, whatever they construe those to be.

Such great literary moralists may be especially contrasted with Shakespeare, the great literary amoralist, who, it is said, "holds up a mirror to life," who depicts man as he finds him (for better or worse), who is consumed by no moral vision, who makes no effort to transfigure the world, who takes no moral sides in any conflict. It is no accident that Shakespeare was a determinist, who saw man dominated by inner psychological traits, ultimately crushed by inherent character flaws. It is this determinism that led to his vividly-tragic view of human life and leaves his work bereft of moral fire with which to fight for change.

But for the Romantics, as for all moralists, there is an underlying premise at work regarding cognition: reality is knowable. Right and wrong, truth and falsity are accessible to human understanding. Man's mind (soul, spirit or consciousness) is capable of identifying answers to even the most difficult of life's questions. Romantics are burning moralists, to be sure, but they are never skeptics. Free will reigns.