Howard Roark's Integrity In The Works Of Ayn Rand

In all actions and thoughts, Howard Roark never relinquishes his integrity: the central, guiding component of his life that Rand stresses is of utmost importance for any moral life. Roark maintains this integrity in the face of numerous challenges in his career that attempt to force him to compromise the guiding principle of his work: his soul. Culminating in the dynamiting of the Cortlandt building, Roark behaves utterly selfishly, nonetheless. From an objectivist standpoint, this is functional morality, and the ideal for a human as the principle of one’s life should lie in the fulfillment of one’s happiness. Demonstrated by characters like Peter Keating, compromise and selflessness lead only to utter destruction of the soul and of personal
Public opinion, therefore, relies on senselessness. As Toohey gloats to Dominique “Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable?” (346). Toohey’s role as the architect of such public opinion through the consolidation of the immense power that is inherently available over unthinking masses puts him effectively in control of Keating’s career, and many like his. To maintain his role of power, Toohey weaponizes the mediocrity of Keating’s career. By lauding Keating as “great,” other true, great minds are discredited. Men of great creative power such as Roark are dangerous to such a society that Toohey works to maintain. In a world full of people for whom “the cave and sticks are the limit of [their] own creative capacity” (281), Roark’s genius is an affront to all; like the heroic statue designed by Mallory that made “people seem smaller and sadder than usual” (222) the achievements of the true individual serve to highlight the baseness of the majority. As such, men like Keating must placate the masses with tradition, providing an easily attainable lowest common denominator. Unfortunately for Keating, this necessitates him being utterly replaceable in the eye of the public, a tragedy for him when this occurs as his self-worth is based solely upon the “prestige” given by mass appreciation. As Rand demonstrates through the arc of Keating’s
As Howard remarks to Keating as he begs for help, “To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul-would you understand why that’s much harder?” (577). The difficulty in not “selling one’s soul” by remaining an individual is the inherent self doubt and fear that plague most of humanity. Such fear is a result of the detrimental flaw of necessitating public approval for self-esteem. With unanimity in the public, each person, by espousing the spirit and opinions of the public, is able to maintain approval, and therefore self-esteem. To veer away the senseless preferences of the masses necessitates discovering personal values and codes, a thing that Peter Keating’s pitiful return to painting proves nearly impossible to do later in life after having “sold-out.” As the narrator remarks after one of Keating’s early meetings with Roark to plagiarize his work, “Others gave Keating a sense of his own value. Roark gave him nothing” (73). Such a relationship with other humans is degrading to oneself and to others. For this reason, morality is obtained by a selfish devotion to personal happiness, without the need of the subordination of others. As Rand advocates, humans are ends in themselves, not merely ends for other humans to boost their ersatz