The Fountainhead: Peter Keating: 1

Howard Roark laughed.

Thus begins The Fountainhead, with a sentence the author surely intended to establish her hero and his attitude toward the rest of the world. Our tall, gaunt, 22-year-old hero stands naked at the top of a cliff, laughing at being expelled from the Stanton Institute of Technology, where he has been studying architecture. Then he dives heroically into the lake below, swims across it, gets out of the water, puts on his clothes, and strides into and through the cruddy town of Stanton to the boardinghouse where he lives.

All hail Howard Roark!

Then Roark has a meeting with the Institute's Dean—who may have a name, but I missed it—who is going through the motions of giving Roark a chance to repent his individualistic ways and is relieved when Roark insists on his own way. So Roark is definitely out.

A striking feature of Roark is his disinterest in other people. In his hero's march through the town, he passes by several people, who instinctively dislike him without understanding why. (My guess: They are inferior people and resent the presence of a superman among them.) But "... Roark saw no one. For him, the streets were empty...." Later, in his heroic dialogue with the Dean, Roark says, "'... I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.'" Still later, we learn that Roark has said "indifferently" of his family, "'I don't think I have any relatives. I may have. I don't know.'"

Roark really does have trouble relating (even literally!) to other people and understanding their motives. I wonder if perhaps he has some form of high-functioning autism.¹

The Dean dislikes Roark. "A great man, thought the Dean, or a criminal. The Dean winced. He did not approve of either." Later, the Dean finds Roark's indifference to the opinions of others "monstrous." This seems like a caricature of the academic who is afraid of anyone who threatens his orthodoxy, though I'm not sure it's a caricature. I'll give Rand the benefit of the doubt; there are probably a great many Deans out there in our colleges and universities today, much more comfortable with mediocrity than with greatness. But that's not the only type of academic. A great many—perhaps "the majority" is too optimistic—greet originality with pleasure and try to nurture it.

(In case it isn't obvious by now, I'll post this disclaimer: I was never a literature major, nor have I ever had any special knowledge about psychology. Or architecture, for that matter. Oh, and I'm also a slow reader. It may take me months to get through all 59 chapters of this book, if I can manage it at all.)

Getting back to Roark: His viewpoint seems to be that the cumulative knowledge of mankind is as nothing compared to the genius of the individual. Maybe I misunderstand or overstate. We'll see.


¹According to Wikipedia, the New Latin term autismus was coined in 1910 to refer to morbid self-admiration. The term autism was first used in its modern sense in 1943, coincidentally the year The Fountainhead was published.