The Fountainhead

Alexa Woelfle
Mr. Nelson
English III Honors
February 28, 2013
The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand wrote the very prestigious novel known as The Fountainhead, filled with love, tragedy, and the complications of life and the world we live in. Howard Roark is the main character in The Fountainhead and plays the role of a struggling architect who encounters love, destruction, and heartbreak. The two largest struggles Howard Roark faces in the novel The Fountainhead are constructed of the love of his life, Dominique Francon, seeking to destroy him and his talents for the simple reason that everyone else then won’t have the ability to destroy his greatness. He also comes across a great complication of the Cortlandt building. A building he has created which is being edited and changed against his consent, so he faces the harsh decision to blow it up or to not. It is his building and his property, but what are the consequences? Lastly, these two issues now coeinside with each other to now display that Peter Keating and the court are destroying him with “the case of Horton Stoddard versus Howard Roark” (Rand 348), which is exactly what Dominique Francon originally set out to prevent from happening.
Why does Dominique Francon go through the struggle of only destroying the things she loves the most in life? Francon is educated of the rottenness the world is constructed and filled with and believes that greatness has no chance of survival. She purposely surrounds herself with the things she despises in order to avoid watching the world destroy the things she loves. This not only includes people but objects of any kind, including the Almost instantaneously, Dominique recognizes Roark’s greatness, but she does not initially believe that he can survive in a selfless and irrational society. The thought that a man like Roark needs society in order to build pains Dominique, so as a result she tries to destroy him before the rest of the world can. Yet Dominique wants to fail in her...