Howard Roark’s philosophy leads him to strange places: working for an old, depraved former architect regarded as a failure; getting fired from his commission; drilling stones as a quarry worker. Eventually, Roark’s life expands: society begins to notice him through the newspaper and his controversial buildings. In portraying Roark’s perpetual conflict with the world around him, Ayn Rand manages to perfectly capture the pain of living by one’s beliefs rather than the opinion of the crowd. The viciousness of people as they try to claw down the odd one out. The inability of humans to watch a fellow human succeed.
Howard Roark is untouched by all of this. That is, perhaps, The Fountainhead’s most criticized tenet. Idealized and unrealistic characters, “perfect or perfectly flawed.” On the whole, I would say that Rand’s portrayal of the main characters is indeed rather one-dimensional. However, The Fountainhead is a novel with so many intricate plot webs that it seems only fitting that the characters embody archetypes rather than branch out into complicated beings. Furthermore, there certainly are moments of raw, human flaws in the characters, moments that draw the readers closer to them through those windows of insight.
Interpersonal relationships are also explored through an uncanny perspective. The concept of love is portrayed as a mutual, unbreakable understanding. It lacks the romance and the joy that love in literature so often conveys. Roark and Dominique Francon’s relationship is a strange one, one that I do not fully understand. It consists of a self-sacrificial dependence—for instance, choosing to destroy one’s own life so that they wouldn’t have to see their loved one attacked by the rest of the world. Namely, joining the enemy so that they wouldn’t have to witness their loved one left alone and killed in the battlefield. Love in The Fountainhead also consists of an understanding so deep that a forceful night together and five years apart afterward can make no dent in their devotion to each other. Both Howard Roark and Dominique Francon claim to live for themselves and themselves only, yet the reader is often made to wonder how much altruism pools under their cold exteriors.
Speaking of altruism, it’s a concept much loved in today’s society: loving, helping, and working together with others. It’s a concept ruthlessly torn apart by The Fountainhead. Meanwhile, individualism—a philosophy that Howard Roark lives by, the belief that humans should live by their own needs and desires only—is exalted to the skies. These two opposite ends of the social interaction spectrum need not be the only ones to live by. I feel that, in focusing on a central idea through The Fountainhead, Ayn fails to account for the complexity and perverseness of human beings and the even greater intricacies of human society.
Other than this, while The Fountainhead may be criticized for its glorification of independence, I think that it is, above all, a tribute to creators. To people who are courageous enough to express their thoughts through some form of art, language, or technology, rather than meekly altering them to fit with the general demand of the crowd. By telling the story of a fearless, cold-hearted, and strangely detached architect, Rand dedicates The Fountainhead to those who have managed to conquer the tidal wave of social disapproval to take a step in the direction of their vision. In doing so, she says, these people have “opened the roads of the world” for all humanity.
