When I teach Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, my focus in class is philosophical, but I point out along the way how her fiction-writer’s methods concretize, dramatize, and foreshadow her abstract themes. One of my favorite examples is based on the premise that first meetings matter in life and literature. Here are our first meetings of the characters Howard Roark and Peter Keating.
At the beginning of Chapter 1, we meet Roark:
“He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. …
“His body leaned back against the sky. It was a body of long straight lines and angles, each curve broken into planes. He stood, rigid, his hands hanging at his sides, palms out. He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together …
“He was looking at the granite.
“He did not laugh as his eyes stopped in awareness of the earth around him …
At the beginning of Chapter 2, Keating is introduced. He is graduating top of his class, and the distinguished architect Guy Francon is giving the address:
“The hall was packed with bodies and faces, so tightly packed that one could not distinguish at a glance which faces belonged to which bodies. It was like a soft, shivering aspic made of mixed arms, shoulders, chests, and stomachs. One of the heads, pale, dark haired and beautiful belonged to Peter Keating.
“He sat, well in front, trying to keep his eyes on the platform because he knew that many people were looking at him and would look at him later. He did not glance back, but the consciousness of those centered glances never left him.”
The contrasts so far:
* Roark is by himself and his body is described in singular terms. Keating is indistinguishable in the midst of a crowd.
* Roark’s conscious focus is on nature. Keating’s consciousness is focused on other people’s watching him.
* Roark is naked. Keating is clothed, robed, and capped in conventional graduation attire.
Thematically, right from the beginning we are introduced to Roark’s individualism and his orientation to reality; we are introduced to Keating’s collectivity and his social metaphysics; and we are invited by Rand to contrast the two directly.
*
Related: Ayn Rand’s essay “Man’s Rights” in the Philosophers, Explained series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzdOJEV-8Yg&list=PLurzsfhvI4oq3fnsjxS3j9fmlYlZQOMVl
That’s a great contrast between characters. I also love the first line of The Fountainhead: Howard Roark laughed.
What makes Howard Rorak capable of laughing is his first-handed, independent, and reality-oriented approach to life. Even at this stage of the novel before he encounters irrational people, he has a firm and clear view of what he wants and his ability to achieve it. That fundamental approach is what allows him to fully enjoy living successfully and, when encountered later in the novel, treat the irrational as metaphyiscally impotent.