CliffsNotes on Rand's The Fountainhead by Andrew Bernstein

Author:Andrew Bernstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

Howard Roark

Summary

In the spring of 1935, Howard Roark completes a summer resort, Monadnock Valley, in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Monadnock Valley is both an artistic and a commercial triumph. Customers love Roark’s concept and design, and they flock to it. A young college graduate sees it as he rides his bicycle through wooded trails. Despite his youth, he is disillusioned by what he has been taught in college—that an individual owes selfless service to the community, that society comes first, and that virtue resides in sacrifice for one’s fellow men. He finds a sense of exultation only amidst the beauties of nature. Among the works of men—surrounded by the pool halls and billboards—he experiences a sense of despair. He does not want to despise man or the works of man; he wants to admire them. But he finds little worthy of admiration. The young man had always wanted to write music, because the special sense of life that he finds so generally elusive has been captured by mankind’s greatest composers. He thinks that men have not found the words for it, nor the deed, nor the thought, but they have found the music. He seeks to find the promise of that music made real in some act of man on earth. He’s not looking for sacrifice or suffering or selflessness—but for joyousness. He does not ask his brothers or sisters to work for his happiness, but to show him theirs. He needs the sight of it, because he needs to know that it is possible. He wants to see human achievement made real. The knowledge of it will give him courage for his own. At the top of a hill, he sees the broad expanse of a valley below him. He sees houses of plain fieldstone—like the rocks jutting from the green hillsides—“and of glass, great sheets of glass used as if the sun were invited to complete the structures, sunlight becoming part of the masonry.” He knows, by looking at the hillside, that someone understood how to build without altering the natural contours or beauty of the terrain. The houses were separate, cut off from each other, utterly distinct and individualized. The young man gapes. Then he notices that he is not alone. Some steps away from him, a man sits on a boulder and gazes at the valley below. He is absorbed in the sight. The man is tall and gaunt and has orange hair. The college graduate approaches the man respectfully and asks him if the sight before them is real. The man replies that is. It’s not a movie set or a trick, the younger man wants to know. No, Roark, the orange-haired man tells him. It’s a summer resort just completed that will be opened in a few weeks. “Who built it?” the boy wants to know. “‘I did.’ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Howard Roark.’ ‘Thank you,’ said the boy.” The boy knows that the perceptive eyes looking at him understand everything that those words convey. Roark bows his head, in acknowledgment.

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