Reflection on First the Forests and We

    First the Forests, a chapter from Forests: A Shadow of Civilization describes Harrison's view of humanity and what it is. He suggests that humans more similar to animals which directly contrast to Zamyatin's portrayal of humanity in We, where humans are constantly depicted as more machine-like. 

    In First the Forests, Harrison says that at firsts humans will choose to leave their natural environment, forests, and will slowly begin to leave the forests in which they live. Similarly, Zamyatin's implies that humans will move further away from their true animalistic selves and move towards science and technology. Both portray the development of humanity as a cycle and that eventually after humans have "alienated [themselves] from the animal kingdom" they will start revert back to their original bestiality.  In We I-330 is a representation of humanity starting over this cycle, “its fall back into bestiality".

Harrison states that there are three universal institutions of humanity: religion, matrimony, and burial of the dead. These three institutions are depicted, even though differently, in Even though Harrison’s and Zamyatin’s implication of humanity are very opposed, whether it is machine-like or animal-like, neither description follows these three institutions, making humanity neither of these two according to Harrison. Another feature that neither technology nor animals have that humans do is curiosity about the world, or the universe. Humans naturally have an innate curiosity that drives them to find explanations and answers to things. Harrison uses Vico’s Giants to explain to explain this. In the beginning people lived in the forests, this was when they were most similar to the animals around them; they were oblivious to the sky, to anything in the world outside of their forests, this concept is described by Vico as “bestial freedom”. The first time these humans encountered thunder and lightning, they became aware of the sky, due to fear. This fear caused curiosity and thus led to answers, which in this case lead to the concept of God and Heaven and divinity. This is something neither animals nor machines have the capability to do. In We, all of the numbers including D-503 are living in oblivion, but when D-503 left the boundaries of the Green Wall and saw the people of Memphi was when he became aware of the rest of the world.  

Though Harrison and Zamyatin describe humanity as either animalistic or mechanical, but really humanity is somewhere in between the two…

Questions of Conquest and We

The Questions of Conquest by Mario Vargas Llosa and We by Zamyatin both describe very similar aspects of a society, or in the case of We a utopian society. Llosa talks about the same high power of people dominating over the the majority of lower class people who were"incapable of taking individual initiative". In the structure of the Tawantinsuyu, an individual had zero importance and "virtually no existence in that pyramidal and theocratic society whose achievement had always been collective and anonymous". This concept individualism as being insignificant is displayed endlessly in Zamyatin's We, where the entire community of the One State worked as a whole rather than individually. Another huge similarity between the One State and the Inca society as that a "state religion", in the case of We, the Benefactor, took away the freedom of individuals and "crowned the authority's decision with the aura of a divine mandate". Llosa uses the term "sovereign god" to describe this authority, in We the Benefactor is constantly characterized with a God-like ambiance thus making him equivalent to a "sovereign god". Another similarity is that the life of an individual was completely planned and supervised by a network of administrators in Tawantinsuyu , this in We, could be analogous to the Table of Hours where basically each hour of a number's life was determined.
The concepts used in the Tawantinsuyu are directly similar or relate with the concepts used by the One State of We.

Zamyatin's "On Language" and "We"

Zamyatin's On Language discusses the concepts he thinks are necessary for good writing, he tell us that there is no actual division between poetry and prose but instead between lyrical work and epical work. Lyrical literary work would include "the revelation, the verbal portrayal, of the author's personality" whereas, epical literary work would include the "portrayal of others, external to the author". Zamyatin focuses greatly on the way language should be used in order to create good  literary works. He clearly follows these concepts in his novel, We.
Throughout the novel the reader can see that Zamyatin speaks as if he is from the time or has the same background as his characters. For example, Zamyatin writes “if this were being written by one of my hairy ancestors a thousand years ago, he probably would have described her by that funny word "mine".” This is one of the biggest concepts Zamyatin describes in On Language, "language of the milieu and period portrayed" which helps brings the reader into the atmosphere of the story line. Zamyatin could have easily used the word “mine” to describe O-90, but by doing so he would leave the milieu, or environment of We, made his own language visible, rather than the character’s language.
These concepts of using language to portray milieu, atmosphere, and the time period keeps the readers present throughout the novel as it does in We.