The Fountainhead is an exploration of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Rand described Objectivism as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” The protagonist of the novel, Howard Roark, epitomizes the tenets of this philosophy. According to Rand, when a person focuses solely on his or her own happiness, rather than the wellbeing of the collective, it leads to the fulfillment of that individual’s potential without him or her being dragged down by society’s dictates and the mediocrity of the masses. Roark believes this and lives his life by it—it is the very reason for his excellence in his field of architecture, as well as what makes him ethical by Rand’s standards. By contrasting the hyper-individualistic Roark with the collectivist mindset of those around him, Rand makes the case that individualism is the only path to morality, success, and fulfillment.
Roark comes across as an independent individual, extremely confident in his talent as an architect and in his worth as a person. At the beginning of the novel, he walks through the small town of Stanton, completely unaware of the people who stare at him “with sudden resentment” because most sense his immunity to their opinions and immediately dislike him. Roark, however, sees “no one. For him, the streets [are] empty.” He does not give his attention to just anyone—one must earn it by being worthy, and most people are not. For instance, Toohey, the villain of the novel, sues Roark over the design of one his buildings, the Stoddard Temple. As a result, the building is destroyed, Roark’s reputation is tarnished, and he has to pay a hefty reparation. When Toohey encounters Roark soon after, he asks Roark what he thinks of him, to which Roark replies, “But I don’t think of you.” Despite the personal cost to Roark, his sense of self is immune to Toohey’s underhanded schemes.
Roark believes that “[e]very man creates his meaning and form and goal,” and that the mere number of people who think differently from oneself is immaterial. He lives out this principle through the novel by never compromising on his architectural design style, even when faced with a lack of work and money. According to him, egotists are the ones who “do, think, work, produce” because “[e]very creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought.” When Roark’s popularity grows, he is asked to be part of a council of eight architects who would work together on an exposition for a World Fair. Roark declines to be part of it, saying that he doesn’t “work with collectives”—he doesn’t “consult, […] co-operate, […] collaborate.” To Roark, doing so would be impossible because he would have to submit to the will of the majority when working as part of a group.
Thus, to Roark (and to Rand), a group of people working together is inefficient and unthinking. Roark says that when he stands before a committee, he knows he faces “[m]en without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. […] Power without responsibility.” He cannot trust in their ability to think because their “reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space that divides one human body from another.” In the novel, boards, committees, and crowds are irrational and mean-spirited, even when some of the people involved are clear-thinking individuals when they are out of the group. Additionally, committees in the novel are mocked for existing for no conceivable purpose and accomplishing absolutely nothing, like the Council of American Builders that is chaired by Peter Keating (a mediocre architect who knows Roark from Stanton). The young builders in the group get together and talk “a great deal about injustice, unfairness, the cruelty of society toward youth,” but no one has any plan for what the group should do or why they really meet. Rand believes that any group will bring out the worst in people.
Also, Rand insists that contrary to what most people might think, selfishness and individualism are what make a person highly ethical. As Roark says, “the root of every despicable action” is “[n]ot selfishness but the absence of self.” This is exemplified by the “selfless” characters of the novel who behave unethically. Toohey doesn’t believe in individualism or the idea that “any one man is any one thing which everybody else can’t be.” He claims to be “the most selfless man” who wants nothing for himself—he only wants to “use people for the sake of what [he] can do to them.” What Toohey wants is to create a world of “collectivism” where everyone acts, thinks, and feels together, which is why he wants to destroy freethinkers like Roark. Toohey’s ideas have claimed many victims, including his niece, Catherine. After practicing selflessness by serving the less fortunate, Catherine reveals the stress of denying herself her own desires—doing so is making her “hate people” and “demand gratitude.”
In the same vein, Keating builds his identity based on others’ opinions, and as a result, he is insecure and extremely unhappy. He is constantly aware of people watching and judging him, and he parrots popular opinions without any critical thought. Keating’s wife and Roark’s soulmate, Dominique, tells Keating that he and people like him are like “the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other. […] Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. […] No center and no purpose.” In his constant quest to win approval, Keating’s crimes grow in number and magnitude—from lying and cheating to near-murder—while he remains unhappy and dissatisfied. This is the exact opposite of Roark, who is highly successful and stable thanks to his fierce independence.
At the novel’s conclusion, Roark is acquitted at the trial for destroying the Cortlandt building, which he blows up because it was constructed in a different way from how he designed it. His acquittal symbolizes a victory for individualism and America—Roark reminds his listeners that their country is “based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness.” Toohey’s socialistic ideas of universal equality ultimately do not win in The Fountainhead.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Individualism ThemeTracker
Individualism Quotes in The Fountainhead
“You must learn to understand—and it has been proved by all authorities—that everything beautiful in architecture has been done already. There is a treasure mine in every style of the past. We can only choose from the great masters. Who are we to improve upon them? We can only attempt, respectfully, to repeat.”
“Why?” asked Howard Roark.
[…] “But it’s self-evident!” said the Dean.
“The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape [of the building]. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. […] Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important—what others have done? […] Why does the number of those others take the place of truth?”
“You’re fired,” said Cameron. […] “You’re too good for what you want to do with yourself. It’s no use, Roark. Better now than later.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s no use wasting what you’ve got on an ideal that you’ll never reach. It’s no use, taking that marvelous thing you have and making a torture rack for yourself out of it. Sell it, Roark. […] You’ve got what they’ll pay you for, and pay plenty, if you use it their way. Accept them, Roark. Compromise. Compromise now, because you’ll have to later, anyway, only then you’ll have gone through things you’ll wish you hadn’t. You don’t know. I do. Save yourself from that. […]”
“Did you do that?”
Then came the voice.
“My friends,” it said, simply and solemnly. “My brothers,” it added softly, involuntarily, both full of emotion and smiling apologetically at the emotion. […]
It was not a voice, it was a miracle. It unrolled as a velvet banner. […] It was the voice of a giant.
Keating stood, his mouth open. He did not hear what the voice was saying. He heard the beauty of the sounds without meaning. He felt no need to know the meaning; he could accept anything, he would be led blindly anywhere. […]
Keating looked at Catherine. There was no Catherine; there was only […] a nameless thing in which she was being swallowed.
“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered. His voice was savage. He was afraid.
“It doesn’t say much. Only ‘Howard Roark, Architect.’ But it’s like those mottoes men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It’s a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth—and do you know how much suffering there is on earth?—all the pain comes from that thing you are going to face. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it will be. And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world—and never wins acknowledgement. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer.”
“If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I’d have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We’re all so tied together. We’re all in a net, the net is waiting, and we’re pushed into it by a single desire. You want a thing and it’s precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can’t know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you’re afraid of them all. And you cringe and crawl and you beg and you accept them—just so they’ll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept.”
“Just drop that fool delusion that you’re better than everybody else—and go to work. […] You’ll have people running after you, you’ll have clients, you’ll have friends, you’ll have an army of draftsmen to order around! […]”
[…]
“Look, Peter, I believe you. I know that you have nothing to gain by saying this. I know more than that. I know that you don’t want me to succeed—it’s all right, I’m not reproaching you, I’ve always known it—you don’t want me ever to reach these things you’re offering me. And yet you’re pushing me on to reach them, quite sincerely. […] And it’s not love for me, because that wouldn’t make you so angry—and so frightened….Peter, what is it that disturbs you about me as I am?”
“It’s sheer insanity!” Weidler moaned. “I want you. We want your building. You need the commission. Do you have to be quite so fanatical and selfless about it?”
“What?” Roark asked incredulously.
“Fanatical and selfless.”
Roark smiled. He looked down at his drawings. His elbow moved a little, pressing them to his body. He said:
“That was the most selfish thing you’ve ever seen a man do.”
Sometimes, not often, he sat up and did not move for a long time; then he smiled, the slow smile of an executioner watching a victim. He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain’s unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. […] It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the quarry: that he had to drill though granite, that he had to drive a wedge and blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity.
Roark awakened in the morning and thought that last night had been like a point reached, like a stop in the movement of his life. He was moving forward for the sake of such stops; like the moments when he had walked through the half-finished Heller house; like last night. In some unstated way, last night had been what building was to him; in some quality of reaction within him, in what it gave to his consciousness of existence.
“You know I hate you, Roark. I hate you for what you are, for wanting you, for having to want you. I’m going to fight you—and I’m going to destroy you […]. I’m going to pray that you can’t be destroyed—I tell you this, too—even though I believe in nothing and have nothing to pray to. But I will fight to block every step you take. I will fight to tear every chance you want away from you. I will hurt you through the only thing that can hurt you—through your work. I will fight to starve you, to strangle you on the things you won’t be able to reach. I have done it to you today—and that is why I shall sleep with you tonight.”
“And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor’s pocket? No, it’s not as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn’t borrow or pawn. And yet, if I were asked to choose a symbol for humanity as we know it, I wouldn’t choose a cross nor an eagle nor a lion and unicorn. I’d choose three gilded balls.”
“What you’re thinking is much worse than the truth. I don’t believe it matters to me—that they’re going to destroy it. Maybe it hurts so much that I don’t even know I’m hurt. But I don’t think so. If you want to carry it for my sake, don’t carry more than I do. I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain. You mustn’t look like that.”
“Where does it stop?”
“Where I can think of nothing and feel nothing except that I designed that temple. I built it. Nothing else can seem very important.”
“Don’t you see what it is that I must understand? Why is it that I set out honestly to do what I thought was right and it’s making me rotten? I think it’s probably because I’m vicious by nature and incapable of leading a good life. That seems to be the only explanation. But…but sometimes I think it doesn’t make sense that a human being is completely sincere in good will and yet the good is not for him to achieve. I can’t be as rotten as that. But…but I’ve given up everything, I have no selfish desire left. I have nothing of my own—and I’m miserable. And so are the other women like me. And I don’t know a single selfless person in the world who’s happy—except you.”
“I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. […] I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me. If you married me now, I would become your whole existence. But I would not want you then. You would not want yourself—and so you would not love me. To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I’. The kind of surrender I could have from you now would give me nothing but an empty hulk. […] I want you whole, as I am, as you’ll remain in the battle you’ve chosen.”
“You’re not here, Dominique. You’re not alive. Where’s your I?”
“Where’s yours, Peter?” she asked quietly.
He sat still, his eyes wide. […]
“You’re beginning to see, aren’t you, Peter? Shall I make it clearer. You’ve never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn’t want to show it. You wanted an act to help your act—a beautiful, complicated act, all twists, trimmings and words. All words. […] You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. […] Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes.”
“What achievement is there for a critic in praising a good play? None whatever. The critic is then nothing but a kind of glorified messenger boy between author and public. […] I’m sick of it. I have a right to wish to impress my own personality upon people. Otherwise, I shall become frustrated—and I do not believe in frustration. But if a critic is able to put over a perfectly worthless play—ah, you do perceive the difference!”
“Do you know what you’re actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. […] like a work of art. That’s the only field where it can be found—art. But you want it in the flesh. […] Well, you see, I’ve never had any integrity. […] I hate the conception of it. […] I’m perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of slightly higher dimension—and I’ve got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. […]”
“Why?”
[…]
“Power, Dominique. The only thing I ever wanted. To know that there’s not a man living whom I can’t force to do—anything. Anything I choose. The man I couldn’t break would destroy me. But I’ve spent years finding out how safe I am.”
“I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper,” he said. “It makes him no bigger than an ant—isn’t that the correct bromide for the occasion? The God-damn fools! It’s man who made it—the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn’t dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world. What we love about these buildings, Dominique, is the creative faculty, the heroic in man.”
“Do you love the heroic in man, Gail?”
“I love to think of it. I don’t believe it.”
“If you want me, you’ll have to let me do it all, alone. I don’t work with councils.”
“You wish to reject an opportunity like this, a shot in history, a chance of world fame, practically a chance of immortality…”
“I don’t work with collectives. I don’t consult, I don’t cooperate, I don’t collaborate.”
“I think it hurts you to know that you’ve made me suffer. You wish you hadn’t. And yet there’s something that frightens you more. The knowledge that I haven’t suffered at all. […] The knowledge that I’m neither kind nor generous now, but simply indifferent.”
“Look Gail.” Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.”
“Your strength?”
“Your work.”
When Keating had gone, Roark leaned against the door, closing his eyes. He was sick with pity.
He had never felt this before—not when Henry Cameron collapsed in the office at his feet, not when he saw Steven Mallory sobbing on a bed before him. Those moments had been clean. But this was pity—this complete awareness of a man without worth or hope, this sense of finality, of the not to be redeemed. There was shame in this feeling—his own shame that he should have to pronounce such judgment upon a man, that he should know an emotion which contained no shred of respect.
This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.
“It’s what I couldn’t understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. Look at Peter Keating. […] He’s paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself he’s been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness—in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy—all that which comes from others. […] And isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. […] They’re second-handers.”
“Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. […] Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. […] Man realizes that he is incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue—and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. […] His soul gives up his self-respect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey. […] Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men.”
He walked at random. He owned nothing, but he was owned by any part of the city. It was right that the city should direct his way and that he should be moved by the pull of chance corners. Here I am, my masters, I am coming to salute you and acknowledge, wherever you want me, I shall go as I’m told. I’m the man who wanted power.
[…] You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.
My masters, the anonymous, the unselected. They gave me a penthouse, an office, a yacht. To them, to any one of them who wished, for the sum of three cents, I sold Howard Roark.
“No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers [.] […] His truth was his only motive. […] The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men. […]
The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. […]
And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.”
