We

A constant topic in We is love, and what it means to D-503. He knows nothing of love before he meets I-330. He has infatuation with O-90, but this is nothing compared to true love. When I-330 walks into his life, he starts to develop a soul. He is completely derailed with this new idea of feelings, and feels he loves I-330, even though he doesn’t truly know what love is. According to Webster, love is “affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests”. In actuality, I-330 and D-503 do not share this “love”. Instead, D-503 is in lust with I-330, for she is seducing him. I-330 has larger plans than forming a relationship; she is trying to get to the INTEGRAL, and using D-503 to do so. D-503 is not in love with I-330, but his new soul has created his love for love. Being introduced to all these new feelings a soul has brought to him, D-503 wants to use and express them. And love being the most powerful, D-503 is eager to spread his love, and ironically, I-330 is looking for just that, D-503 to love her. It is argued that D-503 is in love with I-330, but it is nothing more than desire.

My favorite passage of We occurs in the very beginning of the novel because of how riddled with irony it is. D-503 writes, “My pen, accustomed to figures, is powerless to create the music of assonance and rhyme. I shall attempt nothing more than to note down what I see, what I think- or, to be more exact, what we think (that’s right: we; and let this WE be the title of these records)” (4). This passage expresses D-503’s unemotional feelings at the beginning of the book, his plans to write down everything that happens in a mathematician’s life in ONE STATE. What his writing turns out to be is a passionate, romantic, meaningful struggle a man goes through finding himself in a society that does not recognize independence. I love that amount of irony. The use of foreshadowing is also noted in this passage. “I shall attempt nothing more than to write down what I see.” This alludes to the fact that there is something more, and that is just what D-503 ends up writing about, the emotional struggles of life.

I felt a very interesting connection with D-503 in We. I felt it very interesting that not many other people thought in the same way I did. D-503 liked to think in numbers. He loved math because there was one equation, and one answer. There are no different interpretations, or different views on a situation in math. It is either right or wrong. This is why D-503 loved math so much, and in the beginning of the novel this is how he liked to think. When emotions and different outlooks on society came in the equation, he become very uneasy and compared it to √-1. He hated √-1 because of its imaginary property, and that you couldn’t solve it. In discussion, most people thought D-503’s way of thinking in mathematical terms was crazy, and they felt having no definite right or wrong answer was better than the definitive properties of math. I, however, do not think this way in the least and am always frustrated in areas such as literature, in that people have different answers to questions and they can all be right. I much prefer the definitive yes or no properties of math, and We made me realize that. We taught me something about myself, that I would not have otherwise noticed.