City of Glass: Architecture, Narration, and Unruly Bodies in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s <i>We</i>

ABSTRACT This article explores the interrelations of urban architecture, narrative voice, and embodiment in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We (1924), which depicts a future city built entirely of glass. Rejecting the cultural consensus of the early twentieth century, when glass architecture represented utopian possibility, Zamyatin demonstrates transparency’s potential to threaten individual subjectivity. Drawing on the concept of constitutive rhetoric, this article argues that the glass architecture depicted in the novel trains the city’s inhabitants to think in the plural, inscribing a subject position in which each person is but one tiny part of the societal whole. The narrator consequently becomes an “aspirational we-narrator,” attempting to speak for a supraindividual subjectivity, but the material particularities of embodiment interrupt his sense of collectivity, ultimately destroying the illusion of interchangeability on which the dystopian state ideologically depends.