Roger Enright is another good example of an independent hero. Enright is an entrepreneur, a man in business for himself. He started out as a coal miner in Pennsylvania, rising to his present fortune by his own talent and initiative. “On the way to the millions he now owned, no one had ever helped him. ‘That,’ he explained, ‘is why no one has ever stood in my way.’” He is a self-made man, who has never sold a share of stock in any of his enterprises. Enright owns his entire fortune single-handed, “as simply as if he carried all his cash in his pocket.” Before venturing into a field, he studies it for months, then proceeds as if he had never heard of the way things are generally done. He is an innovator, and though some of his ventures succeed and others fail, he continues to forge ahead with new ideas. Enright, the self-made man who rises from poverty by his own initiative, is a fictitious example of the kind of fiercely independent entrepreneur who flourishes in a free economy.
The novel’s theme is also the essence of the negative characters. Take, for example, Hopton Stoddard, who hires Roark to build a Temple of the Human Spirit. Stoddard is a guilt-ridden businessman who has made a fortune, in part, through various shady deals. Seeking penance, he subscribes to Toohey’s code of self-sacrifice and contributes to the causes Toohey recommends. In general, he is a slavish follower of Toohey. His last spark of independence is his insistence on building the temple. His quest for forgiveness has driven him to religion and, in desperation, he wishes to make God an offering. Toohey, an atheist and a socialist, wants Stoddard to build a home for sick children, but, for once, Stoddard refuses to obey. He is adamant—it must be a temple. Toohey finally agrees, knowing that the masterpiece Roark designs will be so unlike traditional places of worship that the public and Stoddard will be appalled. Toohey’s main purpose is to make Roark notorious as an “enemy of religion.” But a secondary gain is the way he can make the terrified Stoddard bear responsibility for the fiasco, and manipulate him into building the home for afflicted children. Toohey’s scheme succeeds regarding Stoddard, whose last vestige of autonomous functioning is eliminated. He now follows Toohey unquestioningly in all moral issues. “In matters of the spirit he regarded Toohey upon earth somewhat as he expected to regard God in heaven.” Stoddard’s character illustrates that a guilt-ridden man is a prime candidate to accept a code of self-sacrifice, and to surrender his soul to the spiritual authorities who preach it. Toohey’s approval assuages Stoddard’s guilt, and so he kneels, he follows, he obeys.
All the minor characters obey in the way that Stoddard does. In various forms, all of these characters voluntarily surrender their minds to society, granting to others the status of master. Guy Francon, for example, is a phony. His impeccable manners, his elegant garb, his French vocabulary are all devices calculated to achieve one goal: to impress others. Other than his love for Dominique, Francon has no values of his own. His professional life is a series of actions catering to the tastes of the public. He is merely a servant. Society is his master.
Lois Cook is a different variation on psychological dependence. She is an avant-garde writer, composing in a “word salad” style, a series of incoherent sentences in which the words are related by sound and emotional association, not by an attempt to communicate meaning. Her goal, as stated by the expressionists and Dadaists of the early twentieth century, is to “shock the bourgeoisie.” She is a nonconformist who attacks the values of others. Just as Cook’s unintelligible writing style is a deliberate assault on the rules of grammar and meaning, so her slovenly personal habits are also calculated to shock society, whose members value beauty and grooming. As with a conformist like Guy Francon, Cook’s life is dominated by the values of other people. Francon panders to the tastes of others; Lois Cook flouts them. But to both Francon and Cook, the standards of others is the ruling concern.
The foregoing analyses can be replicated with every character in the story. Each one is a distinctive variation on the principles of independence or dependence. Ayn Rand, in describing Roark’s achievement at Monadnock Valley—the manner in which the individual houses constituting the resort are unique but similar—provides a fitting account of her own achievement: “There were many houses, they were small, they were cut off from one another, and no two of them were alike. But they were like variations on a single theme, like a symphony played by an inexhaustible imagination, and one could still hear the laughter of the force that had been let loose on them, as if that force had run, unrestrained, challenging itself to be spent, but had never reached its end.” Each character in the story is, similarly, a variation on a single theme, created by an inexhaustible imagination.
The plot—the struggle of an innovative architect to win acceptance for his ideas against the entrenched beliefs of society—is a perfect vehicle to express the theme. Additionally, the specific antagonists who oppose the creator/hero—traditionalists, conformists, and socialists—are all variations on the theme of second-handedness, further dramatizing the novel’s theme. Finally, each character—major and minor, positive and negative—is a distinctive variation on the theme. The overall result is a tightly integrated work of literature, expressing a profound thesis regarding human nature.
