Thursday, February 3, 2011

Lightbulb Moment

It's not about Howard Roark or Peter Keating.  It's not about architecture or New York City.  It's not the socialites manipulating each other at the Banner.  It's her.  It's all about her.  When I first started reading The Fountainhead, I couldn't quite figure out why the book was partitioned into neat little subheadings with the main characters' names (Peter Keating, Elsworth M. Toohey, Gail Waynad, Howard Roark), and it's taken me 3/4 of the book to figure out that it's her.  Each of the four parts of the book takes a look at how Dominique Francon transforms these men and how, despite her supposed inability to feel and relate, these men have a profound effect on her, how she sees the world, how she sees herself.  I'm not even finished with this book, and I want to read it again.  She is the fountainhead.  Everything that Dominique Francon stands for, everything the so vehemently opposes somehow manipulates and illuminates everyone around her.  And yet she is equally changed by the people around her, even though she is good at hiding it.  She's taken from this exuberant nude statuesque figure, an ideal of what human beings can potentially be, and she's softened, roughed up by the very people that she despises, even more-so by the ones that she respects and loves.  In a world where people are so incredibly caught up in the perceptions of everyone else, Dominique Francon views the world so purely, so selfishly, the way that it should be viewed.  The Fountainhead is a testament to the ideals that we should hold as a society, and yet the perfect protagonist fails to do so because she is thrown into the thick of the selfish, dirty society in which we all live.  What a raw social commentary.