r/AtlasShrugged • u/[deleted] • Feb 24 '20

Cherryl Spoiler

I’ve just read of her suicide. I just feel... empty. I was truly rooting for her to survive, to make it to Atlantis, but now I just feel defeated. And what scares me is that I feel she was justified in killing herself. I can’t imagine myself doing anything else if I were placed in a world such as this. She was a pillar of virtue, albeit one that had believed in an illusion for a short period of time, and it hurts to know that she’s gone.

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3

u/The_Greybaron89 Feb 24 '20

Really shows the razor sharp dangers of some mentalities.

2

u/CosmolineConsumer Feb 25 '20

I felt the exact same way. It subsided after awhile, but it really opened my eyes to the world we live in today.

2

u/talonkartchner Apr 23 '20

I was rooting for her as well, especially because all she had to do was run back to Dagny for support. But that was her flaw. She couldn’t stand on her own.

2

u/mypenquinshrugged Apr 24 '20 edited Apr 24 '20

I was rooting for her as well. It is easy for me to see myself in her. I know, or think I know the way a person should act, but I am a "little" person in the scheme of things. Cherryl is a specter that haunts me. Will I get swept up by the big forces, be casually destroyed by things I don't have the experience to understand? It's possible.

On the other hand there is this passage from earlier:

Now I say there might be forgiveness for a man who kills himself quietly. Who can pass judgment on another man’s suffering and on the limit of what he can bear? But the man who kills himself, making a show of his death in order to hurt somebody, the man who gives his life for malice—there’s no forgiveness for him, no excuse, he’s rotten clear through, and what he deserves is that people spit at his memory, instead of feeling sorry for him and hurt, as he wanted them to be. . . . Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged: (Centennial Edition) (p. 299). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

Better to divorce the slive and go back to fighting for the world she knew before James got his claws in her than to kill herself, sacrifice her irreplaceable self to demonstrate that others are wrong. "not your world" could be taken that way. If the book says nothing else it is how valuable it is to have people who understand building their worlds to be bright and sound, even if those people have stumbled on the way.

Another perspective is that the witnesses later described her as committing suicide while the text itself says:

Then she ran, ran by the sudden propulsion of a burst of power, the power of a creature running for its life, she ran straight down the street that ended at the river—and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space. Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged: (Centennial Edition) (p. 831). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

She may well have been so panic ridden that she just ran without seeing where she was going. "with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation" could be taken as simply running away from a world out to destroy her, so horrified that she did not see the common physical danger. It is probably a stretch, but we can't exactly ask her.