Chapter 24

Chapter 24 — "Anti-Life"

TL;DR: Cherryl Taggart, who has spent her marriage learning that the great hero she thought she wedded is in fact a small, hating second-hand man, finally hears James Taggart confess in drunken triumph that he hates the good for being the good — and runs out into a rainy Manhattan night, where a smiling slum social worker offering pity becomes her last vision of what the world has become, and she throws herself into the East River.

Summary: Cherryl, who has been quietly piecing together the truth of her husband for months, comes home that evening determined to ask him plainly. Jim is drunk and exalted: the regime has just struck a deal with the People's State of Mexico over the d'Anconia copper holdings — a triumph achieved by trading favors. He boasts. Cherryl, frightened, asks him whether he loves anything at all. Jim breaks open: in a long ugly burst he confesses that what he loves is the destruction of the good — that the great cannot be allowed to be great, that he hates Dagny because she is what he is not, that he hates Hank Rearden, that he hates everyone whose existence implies his own emptiness. Cherryl realizes the kind of being she has been married to. She runs from the apartment in evening dress and rain. Wandering the streets of lower Manhattan she stumbles into a smug slum social worker who, seeing a finely dressed weeping woman, smiles and offers her the practiced compassion of someone who lives off other people's pain. Cherryl recognizes in that smile the same evil that wears James Taggart's face. She runs again. She reaches a bridge over the East River and goes over the rail. Jim, returned home, finds Lillian waiting; in a tableau of pure spite they sleep together. The chapter ends with the title's verdict already pronounced: this is what is anti-life.

Key scenes:

• The Taggart apartment, evening — Jim in dinner jacket, Cherryl in white silk, a decanter half empty
• Jim's escalating confession — the camera pulling tighter on his sweating face under the lamp
• Cherryl running into the rainy Manhattan street, evening shoes in puddles
• The slum social worker on a darkened sidewalk under a streetlamp — practiced smile, soft voice
• A bridge over the East River at night, lights of the city behind
• Jim returning to find Lillian; the two of them, in the same bed, in mutual contempt

Characters present: Cherryl Brooks Taggart, James Taggart, Lillian Rearden, the unnamed slum social worker

Locations / settings:

• Taggart penthouse apartment — chandelier, decanter, dinner clothes
• Manhattan streets in rain — wet pavement, fog, tenement light
• A small bridge over the East River — wet stone, river dark below
• A bed in the dim Taggart bedroom — two heads on white pillows in shared loathing

Visual motifs: a woman in white silk in a wet street under a streetlamp; a smiling face in a doorway promising compassion that is appetite; a wet stone bridge above a black river; two figures in a bed under a single dim lamp

Emotional tone: suffocating, revelatory, terrified, finally ruined

Confidence: high — Cherryl's confrontation, the social worker scene, and her suicide are among the most-cited beats of Part III.