The Fountainhead Essay Contest for students of high schools and junior colleges in India 2001 First Prize Essay

  Preethi Subramanian, Cathedral and John Connon School, Mumbai

Topic: No. 3 (For each of the following quotes, explain its significance in the story and their general implications.)

Ayn Rand’s philosophy for living on earth is based on reason. It has been logically derived therefore there can be no compromise when adopting it as a way of life. Two and two will always make four. Three may be pretty close but it’s still not four. There is only one answer. There are no degrees of the ideal. Man either lives the ideal or he doesn’t. He cannot be commended for being nearly there.

Dominique is a woman as she should be. She recognizes only two choices. She can live in a world where the only thing that matters and is recognized is merit. Roark’s world. The world as it should be. She sees the world as it actually is as not only far from the ideal but as actually malignant. Far from offering Roark even a fighting chance, it tries its hardest to destroy him. Therefore she cannot live in this world and try and defend the ideal by non-ideal standards. To love Roark and to live by the world’s rules is a compromise. That is not acceptable. There is no middle path.

Therefore the only other logical thing to do is to live as the world demands she live. Fully and completely, not sparing herself any ugliness, never attempting to redeem anything. This is what she means when she says that the ‘halfway, the almost, the just about, the in- between’ is an unacceptable to her.

As a youngster with a keenly intelligent mind and great ambition in his heart, Gail Wynand saw ineptitude all around him. He saw better, more efficient ways of doing things and found that his suggestions were met with a contemptuous " You don’t run things around here." He met the editor whose article on corruption he had admired who told him that he didn’t remember ‘every piece of swill he wrote’ and his hero was shattered. It was then that he made his most dangerous mistake. He concluded wrongly that the world belonged to the incompetent. That they would win anyway. Anybody who bothered with integrity was a sucker who could not but lose.

Gail Wynand thought he would play the game their way, teach himself to accept ineptitude as his master and thus become master of it. He did not see that nothing is justifiable but the ideal and that does not require justification.

And so the Banner was born. He pandered to the masses, told them what they wanted to hear, glorified every mediocrity and delivered himself to the crowd. In return he got – Success by their standards- Money, Fame and Power.

It was only when he met Roark that he understood where he had erred. Roark would win. They could not defeat him. Roark had done what he, Gail should have. He had stood firm in the courage of his convictions. He was invincible. Gail Wynand, who was not born to be a second hander had forced himself to become one because he lacked the courage of his own greatness.

Wynand had always wanted to erect the ‘Wynand building’. It was to be the tallest structure in the city, a monument to his life and a tribute to his achievement.

Now he saw his error, realized that he was a man who could have been. He had ensured that he could not be worthy of a building by Howard Roark the moment he decided in faraway Hell’s kitchen to become master of the masses by selling himself to them. This is why he tells Roark to build the Wynand Building ‘as a monument to that spirit which is yours...and could have been mine’

Henry Cameron had once been famous. People had flocked to him; they all wanted ‘a building by Henry Cameron’. Then he had been rude, unkempt and choosy, doing only those buildings he thought worth designing. When people tired of him and he was reduced to a decrepit office at the waterfront, he was still exactly the same.

He had never compromised on his work, he didn’t know how. He loved his work and only knew that he was good, therefore people should hire him to build their homes.

He did not sell his talent to spare himself the agony of impotence or the misery of poverty. At the end of his life, he could still be proud of it.

Roark, now going down the same path, did not expect the path he chose to be easy. He knew the injustice that would be done to him, the faceless millions who would strive to destroy him, and the mediocrity that would mock him. He also knew that he would, like Cameron, want for nothing at the end of his life if he refused to compromise on the only thing that defines man and gives him an identity – his work.