Topic B: In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand portrays the essential division between two basic kinds of people: “those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth – and those determined not to allow either to become possible.” Illustrate this division from the story, and give your reasons.
George Bernard Shaw once said: “All progress is made by the unreasonable man” – the man who transcends the prevailing reason of his time. In Howard Roark, Ayn Rand created an individual who epitomises the ‘unreasonable man’, a man who goes beyond the prevailing reason of his time to affirm the greatness of the human spirit.
The Fountainhead is a novel of ideas, a novel about the conflict of ideologies. The nature of the conflict is essentially simple. It represents the clash between the exalted and the degraded; the eternal war between the forces that want to foster that which is best and highest in man, and those that pander to his meanest instincts.
Howard Roark, Architect. Three words emblazoned across the consciousness of anyone who reads The Fountainhead. Roark is the embodiment of the soul of mankind – its aspiration towards the fulfilment of its highest promise. In him lives the spirit that has been mankind’s guide through the ages, the spirit which has the courage to lead, to undertake the conquests of the remotest summits, the spirit which finds in itself the greatest good of which mankind is capable.
Howard Roark was expelled from the university at which he studied architecture, because the buildings he designed did not conform to the stereotypes desired of him. Because he was different, he was incomprehensible and therefore frightening to those who sat on judgement on him. Howard Roark was feared, and so he was made an outcast. He sought a job with Henry Cameron, an architect who, many years before, had dared to be different. In the eyes of the world, he had failed, but not in Roark’s eyes. When Cameron asked Roark why he wanted to become an architect, Roark replied: “Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them . . . for myself.”
The word, which comes to mind when one thinks of Howard Roark, is ‘integrity’. In the context of The Fountainhead, it means honesty to one’s personal aspirations, and never-failing loyalty to an idea. Howard Roark never loses his integrity, his desire to change the shape of things. He does not accept a compromise even once in all the years that he battles against a world that resents him - the years during which he is plunged into poverty by the closure of Cameron’s business; when he enters and quits the service of Peter Keating, a man who fears and hates him; when he labours in a granite quarry and finds the love of his life, Dominique Francon; when she strives to destroy him and punish both herself and him, marrying first Peter Keating and then Gail Wynand, a man who stood for everything Roark hated.
There is in the character of Howard Roark a certain quality of immortality, an indestructible greatness that cannot be confined by the limits of time and space. What marks him out from his fellow men is the fact that he had the courage to do what he did because it was what he wanted to do, because it was what was due to himself. He is the supreme egotist – “the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner.”
Roark’s role in the novel is to uphold the value of self-esteem: man’s confidence in his own ability, his belief in himself and in his search for the best of which he is capable. Man’s aim in this is not to please others, but to seek his own happiness, the fulfilment of his own desires.
Ellsworth Monkton Toohey is in every way the antithesis of Howard Roark. He is the insidious force of evil, for he sees the issues that confront mankind quite as clearly as Roark does, and chooses to embrace the cause of mankind’s degradation. Like Dominique Francon, he sets out to ruin Howard Roark’s career. But Dominique’s motives are personal – she sees in Roark the embodiment of integrity, and tries to prevent that integrity from exposing itself to a world that will try to defile it. Toohey, on the other hand, is fighting not a person but a cause.
The Ellsworth Tooheys of this world seek to subjugate the soul of man. They try to prevent it from seeking fulfilment, destroying happiness by labelling it as sinful. They preach the doctrine of selflessness, discouraging man’s highest aspirations. They instil in men the belief that they must live not for themselves, but for others; that the greater good of the community is all-important, and that personal satisfaction is meaningless. They create a world in which men come to despise themselves, looking always for the approval of others in whatever they do. The spirit of man is then broken and enchained, and men are at the mercy of those few who have deliberately brought about this state of things. Power over this miserable empire of degraded and abased natures is their goal. In order to achieve this, they must first destroy the Howard Roarks of the world, who stand firm in their self-respect.
Those who succumb to the doctrine of the Tooheys are like parasites, incapable of sustaining themselves. They are like Peter Keating, a man so dependent on the approval of society that he has nothing left to support him when he loses his position as a successful architect. Even at this point, he cannot renounce Ellsworth Toohey and his doctrines, although these are what have caused his misery. The unhappiness and sheer waste that these doctrines can bring about are also illustrated in Toohey’s niece, Catherine Halsey. By teaching her that one must always place the happiness of others before one’s own, suppressing one’s desires and even one’s identity, he effectively converts her from a sensitive, caring girl into an unfeeling and domineering woman.
The rottenness of the mediocrity against which Roark’s life is a protest is embodied in the New York Banner, a newspaper that caters to the worst tastes of the populace. In the hands of men like Toohey, it is a tool to hasten the downward descent of mankind. The owner of the Banner, Gail Wynand, is the most tragic figure in the novel. He is a man ‘not born to be a second-hander’; a man with the same ability to perceive and achieve greatness that Roark possessed. But in his thirst for power, he surrenders himself to the realm of the second-handers, creating an instrument capable of spreading an immense amount of evil, which ultimately destroys him.
The central conflict in The Fountainhead is one between those who believe that the creative force in man is supreme, and those who want to suppress it. The former are men who find in the achievements of man the only thing on earth worth worshiping, who feel a sense of exaltation whenever they contemplate one of mankind’s great creations or perceive in their own work the realisation of their dreams. For these men, the self, the ego, is the fountainhead, the source of their inspiration, of all that is worthy in them. The innate nobility of the human spirit of endeavour is upheld in them. It is indestructible.
Copyright 2002, Liberty Institute
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