Other Things Worthy of Your Time
The Others That Exist
(Fountainhead Essay
Contest 2003)
4/18/03
“How do the characters and events of The Fountainhead dramatize Roark’s point? (The moral superiority of egoism over altruism.)”
A man needs legs to walk, eyes to see, and a mind to think for himself, but he needs none of these to survive. He needs only a heart to pump life through his veins. Altruism doesn’t need individual opinions, and it doesn’t need individual achievement, but the heart of altruism lies in the individual: the ego. The masses live because of the individual. The individual drives them. That is why egoism is superior to the ideal of altruism, as it was expressed through the relationships and actions of the characters in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
Howard Roark was expelled from the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology for doing his job unlike anyone else (Rand 16). He was expelled for “challenging centuries of mankind’s teachings” when it had never been his purpose to challenge anything. He had never thought twice about what he was doing, only that he was doing it right. Roark is the individual that keeps the masses thriving.
Peter Keating, at the same time, graduated with honors: star student of Stanton, president of the student body, captain of the track team, member of the most important fraternity, and voted most popular man on campus (29). He was awarded a four-year scholarship at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and offered a job at the firm of Francon & Heyer—the most highly esteemed architectural organization in the country (29). Peter Keating challenged nothing and was accused of nothing. He excelled above his colleagues, only by repeating his predecessors.
Peter Keating was an insignificant man. He was inflated by public support, milking it as his only real success, but lacking in anything resembling self-able. To the likes of him, it may have seemed like there was truly a competition between the Keatings and the Roarks of the world. Keating was one of the insignificant people though, riding the wave of change and progress brought on by individuals’ creativity.
Keating and Roark were never meant to clash. They shouldn’t even have been allowed to cross paths, which was why Keating started at the top, and Roark would never be there. In an ideal world, they were incomparable—in completely different leagues. Keating, and those that tried to compare, had it the wrong way though, but might have been on to something when fearing what Roark stood for. Peter would never realize it totally for himself—he had no self—and just had that feeling that made him uncomfortable. Keating wasn’t a pro compared to a lost amateur in Howard Roark. Keating wasn’t above and beyond with his place in society while Roark, it seemed, struggled to even start a career. Unlike Keating, Roark didn’t need to stand on top of the world. He had something that would catapult him into the stars.
There would be no relationship, obviously, or comparison between Keating and Roark if they had never crossed paths. Important—albeit sometimes insignificant—characters—in life as on paper—have a way of finding each other though.
Society as a whole is still best described as a flock of sheep. Every once in awhile there is that one who wanders to the front of the pack, so far that the others realize they should step out of the way, feeling obligated to respect it. Peter Keating was an example. These still are never the figures to lead. A sheep can never be shepard, unless it’s Ellsworth Toohey.
Toohey knew that a shepard’s job, literally, is unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but he knew, too, what sheep were better than anyone, and that his role was, still, to lead them.
“Can you see Howard Roark in the picture? No? Then don’t waste time on foolish questions. Everything that can’t be ruled, must go”
-Ellsworth Toohey (638).
What shepards have is the ability to control sheep. What they lack is the ability to control anything else.
Since Ellsworth is so similar to Keating, he shouldn’t be comparable to Roark either. He knew this. He knew that no one in their right mind would put Toohey and Roark side by side. It was fitting then, since all important characters seem to find one another, that they did, and ended up face to face only long enough to prove the point. It would be the first time they had met, and the only time they would ever see each other up close again. Toohey saw the importance of this. Roark saw it as nothing. Toohey was a mere shepard.
“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had one thing in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed…”
-Howard Roark (678).
Before Roark’s life became a story, he knew he wanted to work for Henry Cameron. As the first page turned, Roark was already expelled from Stanton and knew where the only place he wanted to be was. Wanting to be an architect from the age of ten, maybe it was a Dana Building or some other image of Henry Cameron that inspired him. Maybe it wasn’t Henry Cameron that he wanted to work for, but Henry Cameron as what he wanted to work at, because it always came back to himself. “His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit” (678). Henry Cameron was something inside of Roark, ironically, because Roark was the purest form of something that’s inside of Cameron—inside of everyone: the true self. Cameron was the egoist that was willing to negotiate and sacrifice doing what’s right to support the demands of others. He was the first step in becoming something “not Classical, not Gothic, not Renaissance, but Howard Roark” (19).
Like every world has some sort of beings, every story has characters, and characters to support them, to make them real to everyone besides the character themselves.
Roark knew people; what they wanted. He knew what people like Austen Heller and Roger Enright truly wanted, apart from what the rest of the world demanded of them. He respected and enjoyed those that let him do his job right. Kent Lansing simply knew Roark could do what he did better than anyone, and knew that was what he needed. Mike was Mike. There was just something about a character like that. To Roark it was his commitment to getting the job done efficiently, and his stubbornness—‘I am right, and who are you?’
Steven Mallory signified something inside of Roark that had the potential of driving him mad. Mallory, who possessed the talent to become one of the world’s great men by his own genius, without the support of society, was wasted; abused by people who would never have his gifts, but allowed to prey on him because he felt obligated to reveal his weakness. He was the one person who Roark may have ever felt compassion for—if only for the brief moment when he cast Mallory’s cheap, plastic work of wasted talent away. It was the one time Howard Roark felt for what other people were doing to another person. And that, to Roark, was weakness.
Someone once said, “behind every great man is a woman.” Someone also said something along the lines of, “to give love, you must first have love for yourself.” Roark, more than anyone, could love himself, and, as an egoist, could embrace the concept of love (680). Dominique was the link to Roark’s own heart, because she was the one he could give it to. She was one who would always exist in a world—outside one’s own mind—that didn’t have to exist itself.
“[The egoist] is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary manner. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy”
-Howard Roark (681).
Gail Wynand was a successful egoist, but successful because of altruism. He grew wealthy and prominent by the opinions and support of other people.
Gail Wynand was the utmost admirer of Howard Roark, and the final piece of the puzzle that, when assembled, became him. Roark was what Gail could have been, but never would be because of the life he chose. Roark returned the admiration because Gail Wynand was that final step in becoming the truly heroic and final human spirit—in becoming Howard Roark (319).
In the case of a person like Roark, it wouldn’t seem like he needed the support around him: the mentor, the admirer, the friends, and the lover, but yet he always had them. People need only to be real in their own eyes, but there is still a demand, from the rest of us, for others to be around them, like a sort of mass that makes them whole.
Even to those who only need themselves, others still exist around them. Keating and Toohey were unavoidable to subsist in Roark’s world, but they were not important, and might as well have not existed. Compared to Roark, few were important, and might as well have not existed. Even to the likes of Roark though, a man whose own wellbeing needed only a face in the mirror, others did exist. They existed because an individual chose to see them and let them into his life. They existed around him and because of him.
NOTES
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