We

by

Yevgeny Zamyatin

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I-330 Character Analysis

I-330 is a female cipher and rebel involved with MEPHI. She frequents the Ancient House, where there is a secret elevator that leads to the world beyond the Green Wall and a commune of people living free of the One State’s authoritarian rule. I-330 is outwardly rebellious: she smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, wears old-fashioned dresses that accentuate her feminine features, and engages in intimate relationships not sanctioned by the government. I-330 strikes up a romance with D-503 that, at first, appears to be genuine. As We unfolds, however, it becomes increasingly apparent that I-330 is only manipulating D-503’s emotions to compromise his allegiance to the One State and gain control of the Integral, though the details of her exact motives are never explicitly revealed. D-503 becomes infatuated with I-330, but not without suffering immense moral strife: her opacity, or “X-ness,” frustrates him. To D-503, I-330 is like an irrational number in mathematics: she has no inherent solutions, and there is no end to the ways he can misread her emotions and intentions. D-503 hates I-330’s mysteriousness and irrationality, and he frequently describes her using sharp, malevolent imagery. Unlike D-503, for whom the notion of infinity and the unknown is a threat against predictability and happiness, I-330 embraces the aspects of the world that humans can’t know, taking comfort in the fact that humanity will witness an infinite number of revolutions. I-330 is so committed to personal freedom and revolution that, after D-503 turns her in to the Guardians, she refuses to betray MEPHI, even as she is tortured.

I-330 Quotes in We

The We quotes below are all either spoken by I-330 or refer to I-330. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Individuality vs. Collectivism  Theme Icon
).
Record 2 Quotes

On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality—which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Related Symbols: Colors
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:

And I don’t know—perhaps it was somewhere in her eyes or eyebrows—there was a kind of strange and irritating X to her, and I couldn’t pin it down, couldn’t give it a numerical expression

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330, O-90
Related Symbols: The Variable X
Page Number: 8
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 4 Quotes

With particular pleasure, I listened to our contemporary music […]. Crystal chromatic degrees converging and diverging in infinite sequences and the summarizing chords of Taylor and Maclaurin formulae with a gait like Pythagorean pant-legs, so whole-toned and quadrilateral-heavy […]. What magnificence! What unwavering predictability! And how pitiful that whimsical music of the Ancients, delimited by nothing except wild fantasy.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 7 Quotes

Yes: I never went to the Guardians, no. But it’s not my fault that I’m sick.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330, The Skinny Doctor
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 8 Quotes

“Oh come on—knowledge! This knowledge of yours is utter cowardice. Yes, that’s it—really. You just want to build a little wall around infinity—and you’re afraid to look behind it! Peek over it and you’ll have to squeeze your eyes shut—ha!”

Related Characters: R-13 (speaker), D-503, I-330, O-90
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 10 Quotes

There were two of me. One me was the former, D-503, cipher D-503, but the other one…Before, he only just managed to stick his shaggy paws out of my shell, but now he has crawled out whole, the shell is cracked open, now shattered into pieces and…and what next?

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Related Symbols: D-503’s Hairy Paws
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 13 Quotes

“I hate the fog. I am afraid of fog.”

“That means you love it. You’re afraid of it—because it is stronger than you. You hate it—because you are afraid of it. You love it—because you can’t conquer it yourself. You see, you can only love the unconquerable.”

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330 (speaker)
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 18 Quotes

Through the fog, I see: long glass tables; sphere-heads are chewing in time, slowly and silently. From a distance, through the fog, a metronome is tapping, and under the regular caress of this music, I count to fifty, mechanically, together with everyone: the fifty mandatory masticatory motions to each bite. I go downstairs, mechanically, on the beat, and I write my name down in the exit book, as everyone does. But I feel: I live separately from everyone else, alone, fenced in by a soft, sound-muffling wall, and behind this wall is my world…

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 22 Quotes

What if today’s essentially irrelevant occurrence—what if all this is only the beginning , only the first meteorite in a whole series of rumbling, burning rocks, spilling through infinity toward our glass paradise?

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 113
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 23 Quotes

With a ridiculous, muddled flood of words, I attempt to tell her that I am a crystal and that there is a door inside me and that I feel like a happy chair. But such nonsense comes out that I stop.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 27 Quotes

The sun…it wasn’t our sun, evenly distributed along the mirrored surfaces of the streets: it was live splinters and incessantly jumping dots, blinding your eyes and spinning your head. And the trees were like candles jutting right up into the sky; like spiders on gnarled paws squatting on the earth; like mute, green fountains…And everything is crawling, stirring, rustling, and a sort of rough, little tangle rushes up underfoot and I am riveted, I can’ take one step because it is not level under my feet—do you understand? It was not level but sort of repulsively soft, yielding, living, green, bouncy.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Related Symbols: Colors
Page Number: 135-136
Explanation and Analysis:

In a blink, I am somewhere up high and underneath me are heads and heads, and gaping, screaming mouths, and arms pouring upward and then falling. This was exceptionally strange, intoxicating: I felt myself above everyone, I was myself, a separate thing, a world; I stopped being a component, as I had been, and I became the number one.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Related Symbols: Colors
Page Number: 138
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 28 Quotes

“Who knows who you are…A person is a novel: you don’t know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth reading to the very end…”

Related Characters: I-330 (speaker), D-503, U
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 30 Quotes

“Well, which final revolution do you want then? There isn’t a final one. Revolutions are infinite. Final things are for children because infinity scares children and it is important that children sleep peacefully at night…”

Related Characters: I-330 (speaker), D-503
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 35 Quotes

“Because I…I was afraid, that if she was…that they would have…you would have…you would stop lov…Oh, I can’t—I couldn’t have!”

I understood: this was the truth. A ridiculous, funny, human truth!

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), U (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 36 Quotes

If only I had a mother like the Ancients: my—yes, exactly—my own mother. She would know me as—not the Builder of the Integral, and not cipher D-503, and not a molecule of the One State—but simply a fragment of humanity, a fragment of herself, trampled, squashed, thrown away…”

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330, The Benefactor
Page Number: 189
Explanation and Analysis:
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I-330 Quotes in We

The We quotes below are all either spoken by I-330 or refer to I-330. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Individuality vs. Collectivism  Theme Icon
).
Record 2 Quotes

On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality—which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Related Symbols: Colors
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:

And I don’t know—perhaps it was somewhere in her eyes or eyebrows—there was a kind of strange and irritating X to her, and I couldn’t pin it down, couldn’t give it a numerical expression

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330, O-90
Related Symbols: The Variable X
Page Number: 8
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 4 Quotes

With particular pleasure, I listened to our contemporary music […]. Crystal chromatic degrees converging and diverging in infinite sequences and the summarizing chords of Taylor and Maclaurin formulae with a gait like Pythagorean pant-legs, so whole-toned and quadrilateral-heavy […]. What magnificence! What unwavering predictability! And how pitiful that whimsical music of the Ancients, delimited by nothing except wild fantasy.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 7 Quotes

Yes: I never went to the Guardians, no. But it’s not my fault that I’m sick.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330, The Skinny Doctor
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 8 Quotes

“Oh come on—knowledge! This knowledge of yours is utter cowardice. Yes, that’s it—really. You just want to build a little wall around infinity—and you’re afraid to look behind it! Peek over it and you’ll have to squeeze your eyes shut—ha!”

Related Characters: R-13 (speaker), D-503, I-330, O-90
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 10 Quotes

There were two of me. One me was the former, D-503, cipher D-503, but the other one…Before, he only just managed to stick his shaggy paws out of my shell, but now he has crawled out whole, the shell is cracked open, now shattered into pieces and…and what next?

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Related Symbols: D-503’s Hairy Paws
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 13 Quotes

“I hate the fog. I am afraid of fog.”

“That means you love it. You’re afraid of it—because it is stronger than you. You hate it—because you are afraid of it. You love it—because you can’t conquer it yourself. You see, you can only love the unconquerable.”

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330 (speaker)
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 18 Quotes

Through the fog, I see: long glass tables; sphere-heads are chewing in time, slowly and silently. From a distance, through the fog, a metronome is tapping, and under the regular caress of this music, I count to fifty, mechanically, together with everyone: the fifty mandatory masticatory motions to each bite. I go downstairs, mechanically, on the beat, and I write my name down in the exit book, as everyone does. But I feel: I live separately from everyone else, alone, fenced in by a soft, sound-muffling wall, and behind this wall is my world…

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 22 Quotes

What if today’s essentially irrelevant occurrence—what if all this is only the beginning , only the first meteorite in a whole series of rumbling, burning rocks, spilling through infinity toward our glass paradise?

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 113
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 23 Quotes

With a ridiculous, muddled flood of words, I attempt to tell her that I am a crystal and that there is a door inside me and that I feel like a happy chair. But such nonsense comes out that I stop.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 27 Quotes

The sun…it wasn’t our sun, evenly distributed along the mirrored surfaces of the streets: it was live splinters and incessantly jumping dots, blinding your eyes and spinning your head. And the trees were like candles jutting right up into the sky; like spiders on gnarled paws squatting on the earth; like mute, green fountains…And everything is crawling, stirring, rustling, and a sort of rough, little tangle rushes up underfoot and I am riveted, I can’ take one step because it is not level under my feet—do you understand? It was not level but sort of repulsively soft, yielding, living, green, bouncy.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Related Symbols: Colors
Page Number: 135-136
Explanation and Analysis:

In a blink, I am somewhere up high and underneath me are heads and heads, and gaping, screaming mouths, and arms pouring upward and then falling. This was exceptionally strange, intoxicating: I felt myself above everyone, I was myself, a separate thing, a world; I stopped being a component, as I had been, and I became the number one.

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330
Related Symbols: Colors
Page Number: 138
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 28 Quotes

“Who knows who you are…A person is a novel: you don’t know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth reading to the very end…”

Related Characters: I-330 (speaker), D-503, U
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 30 Quotes

“Well, which final revolution do you want then? There isn’t a final one. Revolutions are infinite. Final things are for children because infinity scares children and it is important that children sleep peacefully at night…”

Related Characters: I-330 (speaker), D-503
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 35 Quotes

“Because I…I was afraid, that if she was…that they would have…you would have…you would stop lov…Oh, I can’t—I couldn’t have!”

I understood: this was the truth. A ridiculous, funny, human truth!

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), U (speaker), I-330
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:
Record 36 Quotes

If only I had a mother like the Ancients: my—yes, exactly—my own mother. She would know me as—not the Builder of the Integral, and not cipher D-503, and not a molecule of the One State—but simply a fragment of humanity, a fragment of herself, trampled, squashed, thrown away…”

Related Characters: D-503 (speaker), I-330, The Benefactor
Page Number: 189
Explanation and Analysis: