Part Four is dedicated to the triumph of Howard Roark. By the end of the story, Roark is in his late thirties and has endured significant hardships but now has everything he wants. His trial shows that his was the genius responsible for Cortlandt; his acquittal demonstrates recognition of his moral principles; his hiring by Enright and Wynand to build Cortlandt and the Wynand Building gives him both commercial success and fame; his marriage gives him an enduring intimate relationship with the woman he loves. How—by what means—was he able to triumph over such concerted social opposition?
The answer to this question goes to the heart of the book’s meaning—to the role played by values in a man’s life. A person’s values are those things or persons he considers valuable, of significant worth; the things that fill his life with meaning and purpose. Roark’s values are clear: He loves architecture of a certain kind—“my work done my way”—above all else. He loves his future wife, Dominique, and his dearest friend, Gail Wynand. These are of paramount importance in his life; other things are of lesser or of no value to him. One key point is that these are his values, chosen by Roark’s own judgment. Unlike Keating, Roark does not go into architecture because his mother chooses it; nor does he marry Dominique because she impresses other people. Roark becomes an architect because the field fascinates him; he marries Dominique because he loves her. In Ayn Rand’s revolutionary way of looking at moral issues, Howard Roark is profoundly selfish. He is a prime representative of what she calls “the virtue of selfishness.”
The question regarding the sense in which selfishness is a virtue is raised at the end of Part One. Roark desperately needs the commission for the Manhattan Bank Building. Mr. Weidler fights for him, but the board keeps him waiting. Finally, they give it to Roark, but on one condition—they will alter his design. Roark refuses. The board members are incredulous; Roark is on the brink of utter destitution, yet he turns down a major commission in the heart of New York City in order to protect the integrity of his design. “Do you have to be quite so fanatical and selfless about it?” they ask. “That was the most selfish thing you’ve ever seen a man do,” Roark responds, squeezing his drawings to his side.
The questions of how Roark’s behavior is selfish—and of what is virtuous about selfishness—can be answered only in the context of the entire story. Ayn Rand challenges 2,500 years of moral philosophy in this book. “What does it mean to be selfish?” she asks. It can only mean, in its denotation, to be concerned with oneself—with one’s self. But one’s self consists of two components: the values that one chooses and the thinking or judgment that one uses to do the choosing. This issue of selfishness is the one that Roark’s life dramatizes. Roark is true, under all circumstances, to his mind, to his judgment, to his values. He certainly wants the commission for the Manhattan Bank Building, and he wants the money and the career boost it will bring. But these are not as important to him as the integrity of his design. If he permits the adulteration of his design to gain the commission, it would constitute a self-sacrifice. It would involve giving up that which is more important to him for that which is less. Such a self-betrayal Roark refuses to make.
Roark realizes that his happiness requires his buildings to be erected as he designs them. Were he to compromise his design for fame and fortune, he would not be happy. Every time Roark looked at the building on which he had compromised—whenever he thought of it—he would experience only shame. Roark understands that happiness requires commitment, in action, to one’s values. To surrender the things most important to him is a sacrifice that Roark will not make. His rejection of the Manhattan Bank commission is the act of remaining true to his values, that is, to his self—in action and under extreme duress. This scene in The Fountainhead often recalls Polonius’ famous line to Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet—“To thine own self be true, and it follows as the night the day that thou cannot play false with any man.” Polonius says it in Hamlet; Howard Roark lives it and shows what it looks like in The Fountainhead.
The board members of the Manhattan Bank Building accuse Roark of selflessness. This accusation is false. But there is a character in the story who is specifically designed by the author to be the essence of selflessness: Peter Keating. According to conventional ethics, Keating is a ruthless example of egotism. He lies, cheats, flatters, manipulates, and virtually murders Lucius Heyer in order to attain partnership in the country’s most prestigious firm. It looks as though Keating does all this for himself. But Ayn Rand challenges us to analyze the issue at a deeper level. A self, she argues, is exactly what Peter Keating lacks.
If a person’s self is the values he chooses and the independent judgment by means of which he makes the choices, then these are the very things Keating has abdicated. His values and his mind have been turned over to others. In his youth, for example, painting was a budding passion for him. Had Keating pursued painting, it may have brought him a fulfilling career. But he does not; he surrenders his desires in order to please his mother. Mrs. Keating is concerned with respectability; she wants social acceptance. To her, painting is a bohemian—not a respectable—lifestyle. An artist, after all, wears torn, paint-splattered jeans, he freezes in a garret in New York City’s Soho district, he has nude women in his apartment as models. But architecture, she believes, offers a very different kind of life. Architects wear double-breasted, pin-striped, Brooks Brothers suits; they have offices on Park Avenue; they draw their clients from the Social Register. For these reasons, architecture is a respectable career. Keating gives up a career he would have loved not because he loves architecture more (he doesn’t love it at all) but because others want him to. He surrenders a career in art not merely to meet his mother’s expectations, but to meet her understanding of society’s expectations. Keating is a conformist. Other people, not his own judgment, dominate his career choice. He is selfless.
