The Fountainhead Pt. 4 Chap 8
“That’s not my first concern. Not who lives in the house,
nor who orders it built, but the house itself” - Howard Roark
The eighth chapter of “Howard Roark” from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, is the first great victory for Roark as an individual. It is his first victory as an architect of thought, not of buildings. This new Roark, this champion of free thought, this crusader for his cause, rather than the man who was willing to sit back, stick to his beliefs, and see how the world moved without him, is the one that is able to win the Cortlandt trial. He is the one who is able to convince Guy Francon of his own validity. He is the one who finally wins Dominique. None of this could have been done if Roark had remained a passive bystander behind the major players. This scene is ironically the entrance of Roark onto the grand stage of the novel, even though, and because he takes no credit for the building he designed. This scene is also important due to its companionship with the three major themes of this book; the power of the individual over the masses, the superhero complex, and the rejection of emotion or sentimentality.
The chapter starts off with Keating entering Roark’s office. The first impression Keating has is one of height, and power over the rest of the city. Height is a symbol of the superhero complex. By making Roark’s office far above all of the other buildings in the area, Rand shows that Roark thought himself to be far above everyone else, and rightly so. Keating claims that he feels that he could “bend and pick any one of them [the buildings] up in his hand.” Roark is the type of character that this archetype directly applies to. He is also of the rare type where a self glorifying view is a positive attribute. Roark can handle it. Most characters who have super-human views of themselves grow out of these roles; Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Dr. Jeckyll from Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, and Capitan Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne to name a few. Roark is unlike these characters in that he is able to realize his own greatness, and yet stay stoic. This idea changes the meaning of the superman idea completely. Instead of having greatness be a sin, it is the salvation. This is one of the greatest abilities of Rand; she is able to take an idea, although it is counter to her point, and make it support her argument and reasoning. Rand is able to use the archetype of the super-human who learns to be humble and turn it to her advantage, and claim that greatness is a gift, and that mankind is just too blind to see those who are gifted.
When Keating returns the next day to Roark’s home at the Enright house, Roark agrees to take the assignment for Cortlandt Homes because Keating realizes that emotion and morality play no role in Roark’s decision. The final reason Keating gives is “You will love designing it.” Here Keating has discovered that Roark, ever the pragmatist, cares nothing for those who would be living in his home, apart from his desire to give them the best, and cares nothing for any emotional ties besides his own, and even those are suppressed. Roark’s emotions throughout the novel are not the emotions that are immediately noticeable as emotions; they are too calculated, too precise. Roark is the epitome of the reasoning man, a true man of the enlightenment. He wouldn’t have been out of place in the early 1600s as a man of the age of reason. Roark’s entire life is based around reason. When Roark begins giving reasons for him not to be emotional, that other people “aren’t incompetent enough” to belong to a housing project, he uses purely reasonable and rational motivations. Not once does Roark claim that he wants to do the home to “help the poor” or to partake in “a great humanitarian undertaking,” those are Keating’s reasons, Roark just wants to build a magnificent building. This is the second of the greater themes of this novel; that the rational outweighs the emotional, that the ratiocinative outweighs the fallacious, and that pure reason outweighs all else.
The biggest theme of this novel is that of the individual’s prominence over the masses. It takes many forms; the struggle of capitalism against socialism, the struggle of Stephen Mallory against society, the struggle of Peter Keating against his mother. In this section, it takes the form of Keating’s realization of his own failure. When Keating says “Howard, I’m a parasite. I’ve been a parasite all my life . . . I have fed on you and all the men like you who lived before we were born. . . . if they hadn’t existed I wouldn’t have known how to put stone to stone. . . . I have taken that which was not mine and given nothing in return,” he realizes that Roark was the winner all along. Throughout the entire novel until this point, Keating had been the winner in society; he got the job, the girl, the money, everything that he could have wanted out of his life. Unfortunately for him, Keating finally discovered his greatest failing, his desire for these things in the first place. Keating throughout the book has been a symbol of the climber, those who gained power by following the whims and wishes of others. There is no Peter Keating through the entire novel. Keating’s character is defined by those around him. When Keating finally realizes this, he becomes almost a shell. He rejects the personality that he knows to be someone else’s, but doesn’t have anything to replace it with. He becomes less than human. This foreshadows Keating’s interactions with Toohey, and at the Cortlandt trial by portraying Keating as a weak and ineffectual character. By finally showing Roark, the champion of the individual, as Keating’s superior directly, Rand displays her preference of ideology. Individualism trumps collectivism every time in this novel, and Rand claims that this is also true in everyday society.
These three themes, the power of the individual, the greatness of man, and the primacy of rational thinking, are first expressed in this chapter. The rest of the book merely serves to emphasize, condense, sort out, and expand upon the main themes already made clear by this passage. This chapter serves as a building point, the sturdy pillar upon which the remainder of novel stands. By developing the major themes, as well as setting the stage in terms of plot and character development, this chapter is by far one of the most important, consequential, and meaningful passages in the entire novel.
