| | Re:
... were there children on the train at all? ...
Rand says so:
"The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, ... "
The berth above a woman in a train must also have been on the train.
The two children were in that berth.
Therefore, the two children were in that train.
However ... few readers notice that Rand specifies that those *awake* on the train at the moment were the ones who deserved, because of bad thoughts, their horrible death. She says so, right at the end of the chapter --
immediately after listing sixteen passengers,
and specifying the thoughts for which they deserved to die horribly,
Rand closes the chapter by specifying that:
"These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas." --
arguably, "these passengers" (awake and having wrong ideas) does not include the children --
since
/a/ they were probably not awake at the time (their mother has put them to sleep),
/b/ a child is not an adult (and Rand specifies that it was every "man aboard the train" -- which I take to mean every adult abourd the train -- who held one or more wrong ideas),
and (most tellingly)
/c/ Rand does not tell us what ideas the children held (that either would, or would not, have made them deserving of death). Rand could VERY easily have given the children their own paragraph[s] in the listing of death-worthy passengers: she could VERY easily have said that the kids, like the adults, were also awake and having bad thoughts (by writing something like "The children of the woman in Bedroom 10 were not asleep yet; the girl was praying to God to give her more toys, and her brother was thinking up new ways to destroy all his sister's remaining toys once the family returned home")
Since she doesn't do this -- since she tells us the death-worthy thoughts of everyone but the kids -- I believe that she means us to see the kids on the train as innocent victims of the bad premises held by adults. "These passengers were awake" I take to mean the passengers who are the subjects of the sentences which open each of the 16 paragraphs describing the thoughts and actions of an adult passenger on the train: in other words, the waking passengers would (or arguably could) include the children's mother but not the children themselves. Rand makes clear that the *waking* passengers deserved their death -- and Rand makes it likely that death came while the kids were asleep: a detail or implication that, in any other writer's work, a critic would praise as a sign of the writer's benevolence (a wish to avoid unnecessary roughness towards even fictional children).
Still, even Skousen's "Rand would disagree with me, so she must be EEVILL!!" attitude bothers me less than the attitude of some folks I've run into -- some who first damn Rand for "never" mentioning children, and who then in the same breath damn Rand for mentioning children in rags, children who die, or children in flashbacks. (When you point out the contradiction, and suggest they change "never" to "seldom" on account of it, they claim you have something wrong with you for regarding their statements as mutually contradictory.)
Some folks will go further: they will admit that Rand mentions children, but will ask you to accept the following as a "reason" that these mentions of children somehow "don't count" as ever mentioning children at all:
"Any children mentioned in a Rand novel" -- here I quote a high school teacher I suffered under -- "either grow up to be adults, or they don't grow up because they die as children, or we don't know what happens to them. If they live to be adults, then they are not properly child characters at all. If they die before adulthood, or if we don't know what eventually happens to them, then they are not properly CHARACTERS at all. Either way, they do not qualify as children in a novel."
(When I asked that teacher what else would need to happen in order to "qualify" a child as a child in a novel -- since the teacher disqualified /a/ any child who reached adulthood, /b/ any child who did not reach adulthood, and /c/ any child for whom we have no evidence one way or the other -- when I asked her to recommend some novel in which a child character did NOT fall into one of those three categories she considered as "non-mention of children" -- she said [and the rest of the class joyously agreed] that I was missing an obvious point:
"If you cannot feel the logic involved here, you should consider avoiding any activity as intellectually demanding as literacy."
I passed the class, regardless, though not with as good a grade as I usually managed to earn even in classes where I questioned an instructor.)
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Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto
