After seeing that Atlas shrugged off the whatever-it-was, I understood everything.
Shrug has just played through my head 50 times and the word is officially weird.
The title means exactly that the big greek dude shrugged.
Not working here.
Holly Willoughby
Holly Willoughby
Holly Willoughby...
would give to Atlas (the Titan who holda the weight of the heavens on his
shoulder)... “If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?” " To Shrug." The implication is that he expresses indifference to the situation.
Therefore, Atlas raised his shoulders and shrugged.
.
I think you can accept more than one meaning simultaneously.
If you physically shrug something off you lose it from your body by moving your shoulders.
e.g. I shrugged off my coat
If you shrug without an object, the shoulder gesture implies indifference, a rejection of responsibility or cluelessness.
e.g. She asked me a question and I shrugged
Let me clarify the original question with another verb. Let's say the novel used " to strike " instead of " to shrug " (which would give a totally different meaning to the book, but my question is more of a grammatical query). Would the title of the book be "Atlas Stroke" or "Atlas Stricken"?
From the answers I got (specially HashBrown's and weejeem's), I now understand the title in this new example would be "Atlas Stroke", as in " Atlas stroke his enemy and defeated him ". Therefore, by extension, I understand the real title for the novel is "Atlas Shrugged" as in " Atlas took a deep breath and shrugged the world off his shoulders ".
In other words, past tense and NOT past participle.
Usually someone "strikes" or has "struck" ... meanwhile, "stricken" tends to refer to more nebulous events such as being "stricken down" (hit) by disease or bad luck.
"Stroke" when used as a term regarding hitting, at least so far as I can think of, is used more as a sporting term, most commonly in golf but even then tends more to refer to the sweeping movement of the club rather than the event of the club hitting the ball.
Of course, it's been quite a while since I've "studied" English and even then it was American English, perhaps the Aussies and British use "stroke" and "stricken" more than the Americans do.
But that's neither here nor there. The important point is that the verb "shrug" has no passive form and no past participle in the context in which you suggest its use. The closest you could come to a past participle would be "shrugged off", as in "having been shrugged off, the coat lay on the floor". This is not particularly good English (because "shrug" is an intransitive verb, I believe, except when used with "shoulders" as the object), and with regard to Atlas (if the word "shrugged" were implied, inaccurately and inadvisedly, to mean "shrugged off"), it would be the World that had been shrugged off Atlas's shoulders, not Atlas off the World's shoulders. Hence, the title would be "The World, Shrugged (Off)", not "Atlas, Shrugged (Off)".
But as I say, one can't use "shrugged" on its own as a participle. Therefore, the title "Atlas Shrugged" means simply that the big Greek dude wiggled his shoulders. In your "strike" example, the equivalent would be "Atlas struck" (past tense, as in "Atlas did strike").
QED
Yep, "shrug" repeated is definitely weird.
EDIT: Clarification: "shrug" is largely intransitive, as described above, but "shrug off" is commonly used with objects such as "defeat", "setback", "problem", etc.
I was getting afraid the thread would meander into the message of this book, not the (grammatical) meaning of its title. Your description totally clears up and answers the question I was asking. Thank you very much.