Howard Roark, the protagonist of The Fountainhead, is a talented architect with firm ideas on the form and design of buildings. While most people do not agree with his ideas or his general confident and independent manner of being, Roark never doubts himself and never compromises, even when faced with a multitude of challenges. Through him, Rand demonstrates the importance of one’s integrity. According to Rand, preserving one’s integrity can be very difficult when faced with the challenges a morally corrupt society will throw one’s way. However, once compromised, the degradation of one’s integrity leads to a loss of self-respect and happiness.
In the novel, Roark represents the archetypal ideal of a person who never compromises on his high standards. Rand holds him up as an example for all readers to see how a man of integrity should behave in difficult situations. Roark is convinced that his style of architecture, which breaks from the traditional styles in vogue around him, is superior in form and function. When the Dean of Stanton (Roark’s architectural school) asks him to compromise on his design choices in order to avoid being expelled, Roark refuses, explaining that a building’s “integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single theme.” He is against pointless flourishes and because they serve no purpose. Despite the majority of architects and their clients preferring traditional styles, Roark never budges from his convictions. Just like his buildings, he, too, follows his own truth.
When the Cortlandt building, a housing project that Roark designs, is changed without his approval, Roark chooses to blow up the building rather than let it stand in its altered form. In the court case that follows, Roark speaks for himself in defense, saying that while “the love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an unessential,” this is not the case for him. For Roark, “the integrity of a man’s creative work” is greater than everything else, including the intended compassionate purpose of the Cortlandt building.
Despite integrity being so essential to a person’s sense of self, it is very difficult for most people to hold on to it. Most people cave when a high enough price is offered to them in exchange for their convictions. Gail Wynand, who runs a media empire, believes that integrity does not exist and takes great pleasure in repeatedly proving this to himself. He finds people who are known to have “immaculate integrity” and coerces them into doing things they are morally opposed to. For instance, one of his targets is a writer named Dwight Carson who praises individualism. Wynand offers to pay Carson generously for writing a column in his newspaper, the Banner, on “the superiority of the masses,” and Carson gives in and does so. While some men of integrity initially resist Wynand, they find it impossible to hold out for long because they soon find themselves “on the edge of bankruptcy through a series of untraceable circumstances.”
When Wynand meets Roark, he immediately recognizes him as a man of integrity and likes him, but can’t resist trying to break him, as well. He tells Roark that he will have all future buildings in the Wynand empire designed by him if he takes his “spectacular talent” and makes it obedient to the “taste of the people.” Wynand tells Roark that if he refuses, Wynand will make sure that he gets absolutely no work, including the odd jobs that Roark resorted to in desperate times, like working in a granite quarry. Roark refuses—he is the first man Wynand hasn’t been able to break—and the two become friends. Wynand respects Roark for staying true to his principles rather than giving in to threats. However, Wynand himself isn’t able to display integrity when the press turns against Roark after Roark bombs the Cortlandt building. Wynand can’t stop his own papers from publishing articles badmouthing Roark—when he tries, his employees go on strike, and Wynand is forced to give in. Dominique, Wynand’s wife and Roark’s soulmate, cannot forgive this, and leaves Wynand. Roark tries to defend Wynand, telling Dominique that Wynand “had no choice,” but Dominique points out that he “could have closed the paper” to preserve his integrity—even though this would have meant renouncing everything Wynand had worked for his entire life.
While money and careers can influence people to give up on their convictions, Rand suggests there are other dangers as well, which can be even more toxic—like Toohey’s idea of selflessness. Kent Lansing, a client who recognizes Roark as a superior talent, tells Roark that he wants him as the architect for his hotel because he has standards of what is good. He also explains that if integrity were only the “ability not to pick a watch” out of someone’s pocket, then “ninety-five percent of humanity” would qualify. However, integrity is not so simple or easy because it really means “the ability to stand by an idea,” and most people lack the strength to do so.
Toohey is an intellectual who wants to create a world of mediocrity that he can rule over, and he understands that only a person with a strong sense of self can have integrity. So, in order to break people’s souls and gain dominance over them, Toohey believes that one must target their integrity by preaching selflessness. This makes individuals feel small since they will come to feel that being completely selfless is impossible, which gives them “a sense of guilt, of sin, of […] basic unworthiness.” Toohey understands that to “preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle,” and a man who doesn’t respect himself has already lost.
While Wynand’s victims protest their subjugation—the novel says that some of them take to drink, others to drugs, and one even commits suicide—Toohey’s strategy is more insidious because his victims come to him willingly, believing they are picking the virtuous path while signing their souls away.
Despite the challenges to his integrity that Roark encounters, he ends up with a fulfilling career and meaningful relationships, while the characters who compromised their integrity (like Wynand) end up losing everything they value, including their self-respect.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Integrity vs. Conformity ThemeTracker
Integrity vs. Conformity 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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.”
“The ‘common good’ of a collective –a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. […]
“Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s.”
