And Rand's nonfiction works are, in some ways worse. AS becomes a comprehensible--if perhaps tedious--novel if one understands how Rand is writing. But her nonfiction is chock full of polemic, falsehoods, and contradictions. 12/18

Galt is a mere *symbol* (which is why he is so unconvincing as a person), personifying the individualist reality that destroys an immoral world order. And that immoral world order is, itself a symbol, of the ideas that subordinate the individual to the collective. 11/18

But the reader has no way to know this, at least not until well into the novel, and not even then if he's not sympathetic to the Randian worldview. The novel is seemingly one in which Galt decides to destroy the world and succeeds, in other words, a physical conflict. But it just isn't that. 10/18

With all that said, I'll offer some negative points about Rand. First, I think she was in many ways a lousy writer. AS is a novel of ideas--not merely *about* ideas, but a novel in which all its elements derive from and explicates certain ideas. 9/18

The point of all this is to say that, to understand AS, you need to understand the conflict of ideas she was exploring and what each event has to say about that conflict. Interpreting the events in the novel in human terms will generally lead to missing what she was trying to say. 8/18

Cheryl Taggart doesn't die because she is expendable; she's another example of deadly immorality--she died from a romanticized view of reality that she could not abandon. Tony (the Wet Nurse) died because of his prior support of the government and its ideas. 7/18

You might recall the Taggart Tunnel disaster, the scene where Rand goes through the train, describing how each of certain people had, in some way, contributed to their upcoming death. This was another way she concretized the moral principle that immorality is deadly. 6/18

That's a point that few, even Objectivists, get so I'll get into it a little. In Rand's morality, independence is an essential virtue--and Willers did not have it. He gave himself to the railroad, even described himself as its feudal serf. So, when the railroad died, so did he. 5/18

I also think you missed important points. You observed that Rand aggregated virtue, wealth, and beauty, apparently missing, e.g., her rather positive description of James Taggart. And, Eddie Willers was NOT one of the good guys, he was an example of what one might call benign villainy. 4/18

So what she put into AS was there, primarily, to explore certain ideas. In Rand's view, politics is way downstream of the ideas she was addressing, and any political interactions were therefore irrelevant. Thus, as you noted, politics got no more than a passing mention in AS. 3/18