Life, as it goes.

A mark of a good story teller according to me is how s/he potrays emotions. How the words describes the feelings and present a vision of the character. In Atlas Shrugged, the author is biased towards her principles. She has a certain belief and she reiterates it in every word. This also reflects in her potrayal of the emotions of her characters. You feel a strong disgust for the looters in the way she describes their faces and a compelling attraction for the industrialists when their faces appear in the story. For example when she introduces James Taggart

" ... He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to his bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralised sloppiness as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat but transformed into the gwakiness of a lout."

The words are so amazingly transparent here. The phrase 'decentralised sloppiness', so apt to describe Taggart's character of an indecisive heir to his industrial inheritance. It sets our dislike for Taggart so easily right from the beginning. What is so significant about her style is that she is unapologetically biased and will not compromise her dislike for the looters by presenting their appearance in neutral fashion or by leaving it to us to decide.

Another example of how she glorifies her industrialists through her words such that one immediately intakes a breath of pride and eyes glow with insipration at reading about such a character. The entry of John Galt is described as

" ... a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheek made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn - yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainity, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgivness or grant it."

The description goes on to speak about his physique, clothes, hair, eyes in such vividness that whenever I read it, I see him and somehow it seems an impossibility that any one can match the man she potrays as if he is meant to remain in the folds of the book as if he is just too good to be true.

This style of depiction is present all through the book. Expressions, grimaces, coutenances, visages, voices, laughter, pain and shock of characters defined to the minutest details with words and phrases like

"She knew - by the way he looked at her, by an instant's drop of his eyelids closing his eyes, by the brief pull of his head striving to lean back and resist, by the faint, half-smiling, half-helpless relaxation of his lips, by the sudden harshness of his arms as her seized her - that it was involuntary, that he had not intended it, and that it was irresistibly right for both of them."

One has to read it, i mean really read it, slowly, deliberately if needed aloud to understand these words and what they convey. Every word read goes to mean something and every word missed is a meaning lost.