Old School: Chapter 4: Übermensch Summary & Analysis

Ayn Rand is the next visiting writer in early February, despite objections of some of the masters that Ayn Rand does not belong in the company of writers like Robert Frost. The narrator wonders if her writing is as bad as everyone thinks, and he buys a copy of The Fountainhead at the train station before leaving for Christmas break. He is traveling to Baltimore to spend the holidays with his mother’s father (whom he calls Grandjohn) and his wife, Patty.

On the train, the narrator sees a group of girls from Miss Cobb’s Academy. One is a girl named Rain, with whom he danced during Halloween. After they were caught dancing too closely, he saw her making out with his classmate Jack Broome and became dejected. On the train, Rain comes down the aisle and makes conversation with the narrator. When she spots his book, she grows excited, saying that she loves Dominique. She flips through pages and reads a passage. She asks to borrow the novel, but the narrator refuses, and Rain continues down the train.

The narrator notices the passage that Rain had been reading, in which Dominique tells Roark that she wants to be sexually dominated by him. The narrator reads the book without stopping until he arrives in Baltimore. Over the next weeks as he reads and re-reads the book, he is struck by how poorly the world treats men who are strong and great. And he thinks about how Dominique rolls over men in her path and treats Roark like dirt, but inside she’s dying for him. The narrator is empowered by the book, feeling like nothing can stand between him and his greatest desires.

Given his new worldview, the narrator grows annoyed by staying with his Grandjohn and his wife, Patty, who are kind and slightly boring. The narrator leaves the house every chance he can, taking buses into downtown Baltimore. The Fountainhead makes him alert to the smallest surrenders of will, like a shoe salesman bending over a customer’s foot.

The narrator returns to school a few days before the term starts. He wants to work on his story for Ayn Rand before classes start up again, but he doesn’t do any writing. Instead, he takes long walks, smokes, eats with the jocks, and reads The Fountainhead again. He wants to be as arrogant as Roark is. He thinks that if he isn’t like Roark, he is doomed to be a nobody. When classes start he hasn’t begun his story, but the longer he goes without writing, the more convinced he is of his superiority. He falls behind in his assignments and gets demerits for missing chapel.

One afternoon, Bill takes The Fountainhead away from the narrator so that he’ll clean up his side of the room. Bill also tells the narrator that he’s not really a fan of Ayn Rand—particularly the “Übermensch stuff.” The German word stops the narrator in his tracks. Knowing that Bill is Jewish, the narrator doesn’t want to push a view that is associated with Nazis. He also bristles at anything he views as anti-Semitic because of his own Jewish heritage, even though he still doesn’t admit it.

As the submission deadline approaches, the narrator comes down with the flu and walking pneumonia and has to stay in the infirmary for two weeks. The first few days in the hospital, he can hardly tell when he’s awake versus when he’s asleep, but he knows that Grandjohn and Patty are there and is very grateful to them. On the afternoon that Grandjohn and Patty leave, another student tells the narrator that Purcell won the audience with Ayn Rand. When the narrator is discharged from the infirmary, he goes to congratulate Purcell, but Purcell says that Big Jeff actually won. The narrator is stunned—he didn’t know Big Jeff wrote. Purcell gives the narrator a copy of the newspaper with Big Jeff’s story in it.

Big Jeff’s story is called “The Day the Cows Came Home.” In the story, a UFO lands in Boston and global leaders gather to meet the saucer’s commander, which turns out to be an enormous bull. The bull explains that, long ago, one of their ships was redirected to earth, and now they’ve come to gather up the descendants of that crew. The bulls then discover cows being castrated, branded, and milked dry in farms. After seeing all of this, the bull gathers the cows and rallies them to join him. Only a few cows join him: the rest argue that they have all they can eat, protection, and medical care. When the saucer leaves, the alien bulls use their ray gun and kill every human being on earth.

In the newspaper’s interview with Ayn Rand, she praises Big Jeff as a great writer in the making, noting his dare to challenge “collectivist orthodoxy.” She compliments his critique of the welfare state, where “the herd counts itself fortunate to be fattened on the proceeds of its own eventual slaughter.”

The narrator still has not fully recovered from the flu—two days before Ayn Rand’s visit, he falls asleep in Latin class and checks himself back to the infirmary. After Rand’s lecture, Bill White fills the narrator in on what she said. She criticized the school motto—“Give All”—and urged students to live for themselves alone. She held herself up as a radical and criticized President Kennedy. She then agreed to meet in Blaine Hall after dinner if students had questions.

The narrator sneaks out of the infirmary to go to Blaine Hall. Ayn Rand sits in a chair by the fireplace and smokes. She asks how many of them are writers. No one raises their hands, and she calls them meek because they are afraid to show themselves. She explains that she wasn’t afraid as a student in Petrograd University, even when Lenin’s troops shot many of her friends and teachers. She explains that her characters are fearless, too. In that moment, the narrator sneezes, and Ayn Rand looks at him in disgust. Rand spends the rest of her talk explaining how people should only live for themselves and if they bend to others, they are slaves. She tells them to look at John Galt’s speech.

When asked about the greatest works by American writers, Rand cites her own novels. The narrator blurts out, “What about Ernest Hemingway?” She says that Hemingway’s writing is filled with weak, self-pitying people—even a “wretched eunuch.” But the head of the school’s board of trustees, Hiram Dufresne, notes that the character to whom she’s referring was injured in the war, which is a sign of heroism, not weakness. Rand argues that any self-sacrifice fighting in a war is weakness, again referring her audience to John Galt’s speech. Dufresne points out that she has her rights only because good men died fighting for them. Rand again argues that people should seek only to benefit themselves.

Big Jeff then asks what Rand’s position on meat is, saying that if her readers knew she didn’t eat meat, others would give it up too. She is appalled and confused by the question, thinking that he is insinuating something. When another boy asks a final question, there is an uproar and Ayn Rand looks as though she’s been slapped. The narrator notes, however, that he wanted to ask the same thing: who is John Galt?