The Fountainhead P. 608-616

Howard and Wayward return from their long journey to find a dramatic change. The Cortlandt housing project is already under construction and while, “the building had the skeleton of what Roark had designed” (Rand, 608), but despite the efforts of Keating to fight off the forces of influence, the building was butchered and had “the remnants of ten different breeds piled on the lovely symmetry of the bones” (Rand, 608). This is the example it once again being ‘too late’, for Keating to change what he is; a second-hander. This time, however, he has dragged Howard’s unbending mind and body into it. Because he cannot conform to society, he also cannot allow his ideas to be shaped by it so long as he has the power to fight back. It’s this exact mindset that makes Howard his own person, and what propels him to seek Dominique’s help in distracting the warden of the Cortlandt housing project as he blows it off the face of the earth.

This portion also exhibits a change in Dominique, who has always been afraid of seeing Roark hurt by society, as she was at the Stoddard trial. Here she is in control, and not phased by society being able to hurt Roark, “She was free and he knew it”(Rand, 613). But in her following of orders of Roark to hide in a ditch until after the explosion and “see that your found in the car and that your condition matches its condition – approximately”, she returned to the car and, “slashed the skin of her neck, her legs, her arms. What she felt was not pain…she was free…She did not know she had cut an artery” (Rand, 616). And with this line they end the chapter, Dominique free of her fears of the world as she is almost leaving it and Roark not letting his work be butchered.