Why does dominique like the sound of the quarry

The next day, Toohey looks to him like "a chicken just emerging from the egg, in all the sorry fragility of unhardened bones," but his clothes are tremendously good. Toohey's eyes "held such a wealth of intellect and of twinkling gaiety that his glasses seemed to be worn not to protect his eyes but to protect other men from their excessive brilliance. Keating attempts to keep up with the conversation and feels incredibly at home with Toohey, who seems to acknowledge the falseness of their situation.

Toohey speaks again about f how great an architect Keating is and how great the Cosmo-Slotnick building is, and suddenly Keating realizes that "Toohey knew he had not designed the plan of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building.

Finally, Keating turns the conversation towards Toohey's close escape the day before. Toohey shrugs it off but asks about Mallory. Keating gives a general and prosaic explanation for Mallory's attack, and Toohey looks at him as though he can see his insides and is reassured. Toohey tells Keating that they will be "great friends. Keating is extremely flattered. The conversation almost immediately turns to a young authoress in whom Toohey has taken an interest, Lois Cook.

Only as Toohey escorts Keating to the door does he remark that Keating is engaged to his niece, Catherine. Keating tells him fervently and truthfully that he loves Catherine, and Toohey responds lightly and a little disparagingly, commenting that Catherine is "innocent and sweet and pretty and anemic. He enjoys it because he is certain it is deep and meaningful--since he does not understand it. He looks at the paper and sees a reproduction of Roark's drawing of the Enright House, "a rising mass of rock crystal.

Here was the same severe, mathematical order holding together a free, fantastic growth; straight lines and clean angles, space slashed with a knife, yet in a harmony of formation as delicate as the work of a jeweler. His mother comes in, sees the picture, and dismisses it immediately. That night is Keating's first visit to Toohey's and Catherine's new home in a "distinguished residential hotel.

He does "not like the way Catherine sat at the edge of a chair, hunched, her legs drawn awkwardly together. When Keating comes straight out and asks him if he approves, Toohey replies vaguely that it is a "superfluous question.

Catherine, suddenly lively, insists that she loves her job in the day nursery and does not want to give it up. As she speaks eloquently about the children and her work, Keating sees her affection for her uncle, and Toohey begins to look at her much more seriously.

When she pauses, Keating changes the subject to the Enright house. He is incredibly happy when Toohey dismisses it. Keating tells Toohey about his past with Howard Roark, and Toohey asks him a series of strange questions that are not about architecture at all. When Toohey asks Keating whether Roark always wanted to be an architect, Keating tells him that Roark would "walk over corpses He tells Keating that they are very pleased that Keating will be the chairman.

Keating takes Catherine out for a walk, but he suddenly begins to think of how ridiculous it looks to walk hand-in-hand. He wonders whether Catherine looks a bit anemic. Later, Keating sits in Cook's living room, exceedingly uncomfortable, as they discuss the house she wants him to build her. He attempts to speak to her about how much he likes her books, but she seems irritated by his attempts to suggest he understands her work.

He also learns that she is chairwoman of a group of writers started by Mr. As they talk about Mr. Toohey, she seems to laugh at Keating, and he becomes confused. She tells him that she wants her house "to be ugly. Magnificently ugly.

He accepts the commission. After a while he stops feeling strange. The drawings appear in even more publications than the Cosmo-Slotnick house did, and people speak very respectfully of him. Dominique Francon returns to New York three days after her last visit to the quarry. She hates the people on the streets because they might have links to Roark. She goes to the office of the Banner to resign, but at the last minute she changes her mind.

One morning Ellsworth Toohey stops by to visit Dominique. She responds in her usual ironic way, and he tells her they will never be enemies. He sees that the article about the Enright House is on her desk, and she tells him that the builder should have killed himself rather than build such a perfect thing and allow it to be defiled by human beings.

At Stephen Mallory's trial the man refuses to defend himself. Ellsworth Toohey himself takes the stand and pleads for lenience. The judge gives Mallory a two-year suspended sentence. At the first meeting of the young architects, Peter Keating is elected chairman unanimously. Of the group of eighteen, only Keating and Gordon L. Prescott are of any standing. Besides architects there is a contractor, a female interior decorator, and some draftsmen.

They name themselves the "Council of American Builders," and Toohey gives a speech about the importance of architecture. He argues that architecture is the noblest of the arts because it creates shelter for mankind. Keating listens, enraptured and ennobled by Toohey's words.

The doorbell rings, and Dominique Francon walks in uninvited. After a nod from Toohey, she sits down and watches. Keating feels oddly uncomfortable at Dominique's presence. After the meeting, Toohey greets her and suggests that she join their club, but she refuses, commenting that she doesn't "hate [him] enough to do that. As Dominique leaves, Keating walks with her.

He asks her what she has against their meeting, but she refuses to discuss it. As he helps her into her cab, he tells her he will not let her get away from him again. She turns to him, and for a moment he sees something different in her and seems to realize that she is no longer a virgin.

He asks who it was, and she replies, "A workman in a granite quarry," which makes Keating laugh. Dominique tells Keating that she once thought she could want him, but now she knows she never will want him--and she wants never to see him again.

She adds, "you're everything I despise in the world and I don't want to remember how much I despise it This is not an insult to you, Peter You're not the worst of the world. Ron Hubbard is another to have developed her own school of philosophy. Her fiction, which contained this philosophy in embryo, enshrined the lonely nobility of the individual, the value of selfishness, the fraudulence of altruism, and the depravity of collectivism:.

Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer — in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Most responses to Rand are split between reverence and ridicule; the extremity of her beliefs and her rhetoric demand more than mere agreement.

Of course, Rand was emphatically not a naturalist. Novels, in the proper sense of the word, are not written to vanish in a month or a year. The artfully deployed multimedia is much of what gives this very long play the momentum of a basketball game: something is always happening, not just onstage but on a screen mounted above it.

The doubling of images — including a sex act that culminates with the heroine writhing in a pool of her own blood — creates spectacle and also a whiff of the specular , a sense that even in their intimate moments the characters are conscious of being on display. All the characters — Roark, Francon, the vacuous hustler, the Mephistophelian critic, the newspaper magnate who befriends Roark only to betray him and then kill himself — are as deeply sincere as believers confessing in church.

Rand was a fan of Dostoyevsky, though his speeches are better and his characters more interestingly perverse: Grushenka makes Dominique Francon look like a Tinder profile. Roark stands for an individual's right to his own mind and to ownership of the product of his efforts. The jury understands Roark's argument, and he is acquitted. Roger Enright buys Cortlandt from the government and hires Roark to build it. Gail Wynand, though morally and psychologically broken, hires Roark to build the Wynand Building, the world's tallest skyscraper.

Roark and Dominique marry. He has achieved both commercial and romantic success — and has done so on his own terms. Peter Keating is exposed publicly as a fraud at the Cortlandt trial — and his career is finished.

Ellsworth Toohey is reinstated to his position at The Banner by the labor board. Wynand has Toohey report back to work at p.

Wynand stands silently as Toohey arrives early and takes again his accustomed place at his desk. Toohey is made nervous by the specter of Wynand hanging over him in the doorway, but is reassured by the sound of the rolling presses — the constant accompaniment of a newspaperman's life. Then the presses stop. Wynand looks at his wristwatch and says, "It's nine o'clock.

You're out of a job, Mr. The Banner has ceased to exist. Standing alone with the man he recognizes as the most contemptibly evil member of society, Wynand says, "This was the end of The Banner.

I think it's proper that I should meet it with you. Part Four is dedicated to the triumph of Howard Roark. By the end of the story, Roark is in his late thirties and has endured significant hardships but now has everything he wants. His trial shows that his was the genius responsible for Cortlandt; his acquittal demonstrates recognition of his moral principles; his hiring by Enright and Wynand to build Cortlandt and the Wynand Building gives him both commercial success and fame; his marriage gives him an enduring intimate relationship with the woman he loves.

How — by what means — was he able to triumph over such concerted social opposition? The answer to this question goes to the heart of the book's meaning — to the role played by values in a man's life. A person's values are those things or persons he considers valuable, of significant worth; the things that fill his life with meaning and purpose. Roark's values are clear: He loves architecture of a certain kind — "my work done my way" — above all else. He loves his future wife, Dominique, and his dearest friend, Gail Wynand.

These are of paramount importance in his life; other things are of lesser or of no value to him. One key point is that these are his values, chosen by Roark's own judgment. Unlike Keating, Roark does not go into architecture because his mother chooses it; nor does he marry Dominique because she impresses other people. Roark becomes an architect because the field fascinates him; he marries Dominique because he loves her.

In Ayn Rand's revolutionary way of looking at moral issues, Howard Roark is profoundly selfish. He is a prime representative of what she calls "the virtue of selfishness. The question regarding the sense in which selfishness is a virtue is raised at the end of Part One.

Roark desperately needs the commission for the Manhattan Bank Building. Weidler fights for him, but the board keeps him waiting. Finally, they give it to Roark, but on one condition — they will alter his design. Roark refuses. The board members are incredulous; Roark is on the brink of utter destitution, yet he turns down a major commission in the heart of New York City in order to protect the integrity of his design.

The questions of how Roark's behavior is selfish — and of what is virtuous about selfishness — can be answered only in the context of the entire story. Ayn Rand challenges 2, years of moral philosophy in this book.

It can only mean, in its denotation, to be concerned with oneself — with one's self. But one's self consists of two components: the values that one chooses and the thinking or judgment that one uses to do the choosing.

This issue of selfishness is the one that Roark's life dramatizes. Roark is true, under all circumstances, to his mind, to his judgment, to his values.

He certainly wants the commission for the Manhattan Bank Building, and he wants the money and the career boost it will bring. But these are not as important to him as the integrity of his design. If he permits the adulteration of his design to gain the commission, it would constitute a self-sacrifice. It would involve giving up that which is more important to him for that which is less. Such a self-betrayal Roark refuses to make. Roark realizes that his happiness requires his buildings to be erected as he designs them.

Were he to compromise his design for fame and fortune, he would not be happy. Every time Roark looked at the building on which he had compromised — whenever he thought of it — he would experience only shame. Roark understands that happiness requires commitment, in action , to one's values. To surrender the things most important to him is a sacrifice that Roark will not make. His rejection of the Manhattan Bank commission is the act of remaining true to his values, that is, to his self — in action and under extreme duress.

This scene in The Fountainhead often recalls Polonius' famous line to Laertes in Shakespeare's Hamlet — "To thine own self be true, and it follows as the night the day that thou cannot play false with any man. The board members of the Manhattan Bank Building accuse Roark of selflessness. This accusation is false. But there is a character in the story who is specifically designed by the author to be the essence of selflessness: Peter Keating.

According to conventional ethics, Keating is a ruthless example of egotism. He lies, cheats, flatters, manipulates, and virtually murders Lucius Heyer in order to attain partnership in the country's most prestigious firm. It looks as though Keating does all this for himself. But Ayn Rand challenges us to analyze the issue at a deeper level. A self, she argues, is exactly what Peter Keating lacks. If a person's self is the values he chooses and the independent judgment by means of which he makes the choices, then these are the very things Keating has abdicated.

His values and his mind have been turned over to others. In his youth, for example, painting was a budding passion for him. Had Keating pursued painting, it may have brought him a fulfilling career. But he does not; he surrenders his desires in order to please his mother. Keating is concerned with respectability; she wants social acceptance.

To her, painting is a bohemian — not a respectable — lifestyle. An artist, after all, wears torn, paint-splattered jeans, he freezes in a garret in New York City's Soho district, he has nude women in his apartment as models. But architecture, she believes, offers a very different kind of life. Architects wear double-breasted, pin-striped, Brooks Brothers suits; they have offices on Park Avenue; they draw their clients from the Social Register.

For these reasons, architecture is a respectable career. Keating gives up a career he would have loved not because he loves architecture more he doesn't love it at all but because others want him to. He surrenders a career in art not merely to meet his mother's expectations, but to meet her understanding of society's expectations.

Keating is a conformist. Other people, not his own judgment, dominate his career choice. He is selfless. A person generally pursues long-term happiness in two areas: career and love. Because Keating is not excited by architecture, he has condemned himself to a career of unrelieved drudgery. His one chance at lasting happiness lies in the area of romantic love.

The good news is that he and Catherine Halsey love each other. The sincerity of Keating's love is shown by his refusal to use Katie. He desires to meet Ellsworth Toohey, the rising star of architectural criticism, whose patronage is sufficient to make or break an architect.

Catherine, Toohey's innocent niece, is willing to introduce Keating to Toohey immediately, but Keating refuses. He confesses to her that he uses people, and vows that he will not do it to her; he wants their relationship clean, untainted by his manipulative methods. Gail Wynand says in another context that "love is the exception-making," that a person will do for the loved one things he would do for no other.

Keating manipulates everyone. Katie is the only one he relates to honestly; she is the one exception in his life. He loves her and he would be happy with her. But he leaves her the night before his wedding to marry Dominique Francon. Keating does not love Dominique; he does not even like her. Because Dominique sees clearly Keating's fraudulent nature and is unafraid to state the truth openly, she intimidates him.

He jilts the woman he loves and marries a woman he does not love for the very reason he originally became an architect: to impress other people. Keating doesn't leave Katie just because she's plain. In addition to beauty, Katie lacks poise and elegance; she has none of the social graces that Dominique has. If Keating walks into the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria with Katie on his arm, not one head in the room will turn; no one will be impressed.

But Dominique is quite another matter. In addition to her beauty, Dominique possesses the charm and poise lacking in Katie. She impresses people. This is the exchange Keating makes: He gives up the woman he loves and a lifetime of happiness in order to impress other people with the "trophy" wife he has in Dominique. Love and happiness for prestige — this is the trade Keating makes.

Again, Keating betrays what he wants, and what will make him happy, in order to gain social approval. The deeper point in Keating's life is that, in giving up his values, Keating gives up his mind. His life is no longer ruled by what he thinks, knows, and wants — but by what others believe and want.

Their values and thinking now govern his life, not his own. Keating has abdicated his self; he has betrayed it so fully that, by the end of the story — before he is even forty — there is nothing left of him. He is an empty shell of a man, with nothing uniquely his own. Every personal vestige has been sacrificed in order to please others. He has reached a state of selflessness in its literal meaning — he is without self.

He is the opposite of Howard Roark. The results of selfishness and selflessness are obvious. Roark, no matter the duration and difficulty of his struggle, is on a value -quest; his life is filled, from top to bottom, with the things he loves.

A life full of designing structures like the Aquitania Hotel and the Enright House, of intimate moments with the woman he loves, of hours with friends such as Wynand, Mallory, Mike Donnigan, and, of course, Henry Cameron — this is the impassioned, value-driven existence of Howard Roark.

Even though at times he struggles, Roark has surrounded himself from morning until night with the things, people, and activities most important to him. Roark's life, therefore, is an ongoing love affair. The exact opposite is true of Keating. He has abandoned the things most important to him — painting and a relationship with Catherine Halsey.

The things his day is filled with — architecture and a relationship with Dominique Francon — are not important to him. His life is a series of meaningless actions, an existence of drudgery. For several years, he has all the prestige and social approval a man can ask for, but this is external. Internally, he has nothing.

The heartbreaking scene near the end, when Keating returns to his abandoned childhood love — painting — and brings his canvases to Roark, shows this. Roark, looking at the crude, childish work, is overcome with pity and can barely bring himself to speak the truth. But it is too late for Keating. A lifetime of betraying his mind, his thinking, his artistic judgment, has killed whatever creative spark he may have possessed long ago.

Creativity, by its very nature is a self -driven activity; it is not borrowed from others. On the contrary, it necessarily involves new ideas, thoughts that others have not had. One can choose to follow the crowd or one can choose to be creative, but one cannot be both. Keating's stated lifelong policy, "Always be what people want you to be," is the credo of blind followers. As such, it is anathema to creativity. Consistent acts of self-betrayal cannot be performed with impunity.

Just as Roark's success relative to Keating's failure shows the virtue of selfishness and the evils of selflessness — so Roark's triumph over Toohey's machinations demonstrates another moral truth. Toohey is a highly intelligent, possibly brilliant individual, who, though lacking the creative abilities of Roark and Wynand, could have been an outstanding scholar had he made other choices.

But for all the ingenious cunning of his schemes, Toohey fails utterly in his attempts to stop Roark and to take control of Wynand's newspaper.

The reasons for Toohey's defeat go to the heart of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Every activity of Toohey's life is oriented toward other people. He critiques the work of others by reference to moral and aesthetic theories developed by still others in order to control and enslave others still. Not a single act of Toohey's life is creative. In other words, nothing he does is directed toward building or constructing something. He does not even hammer nails into wood to make a chair or paint the walls of his living room.

Such creative activities as carpentry and house-painting are utterly alien to him. Toohey is helpless to deal directly with nature, with physical reality; his distinctive orientation is social. He seeks no mastery over nature but exclusively over men.

It is the very parasitism of Toohey's functioning that makes him dangerous. It is also what leaves him helpless. If he cannot perform constructive tasks, how is he to survive in a physical world? Only by insinuating himself into the souls of others and controlling them can he survive.

Roark states in his courtroom address that the creator seeks to conquer nature and the parasite to conquer men. Toohey's helplessness in the face of reality drives him toward spiritual and social conquest.

He must hold dominion over others in order to ensure his own survival. The larger Toohey's cult following, the more powerful the buffer between him and the physical world of which he is terrified. Victims like Keating and Catherine Halsey are not weaker — like antelopes devoured by a lion — but essentially stronger in their capacity to deal efficaciously with physical reality.

Toohey must control them, for their very ability to perform at least some types of productive work is the lifeline he craves. Keating and Catherine are his sole source of survival, and so, like a vampire of the spirit, he sucks their lifeblood.

But Toohey is even worse than this. His power-seeking is not fundamentally motivated by a quest for survival, but by something significantly more evil. He doesn't merely fear the men capable of independent existence; he hates and desires to destroy them. In his childhood, he knew Johnny Stokes, "a bright kid with dimples and curls," whom people always turned to see.

Because no one ever turned to look at Ellsworth Toohey, he turns the hose on Johnny. Years later, part of his scheming to involve Dominique first with Keating, then with Wynand, is a plainly stated intention to destroy this brilliant and beautiful woman. He openly seeks to ruin Roark's career and, in a confession speech at the end of the novel, Toohey answers Keating's question regarding a desire to kill Roark by stating that he wants Roark alive — but utterly broken.

The question of the fate to befall the independent men of the world if and when Toohey reaches his goal of intellectual advisor to a Fascist or Communist dictator is clear: Just as he intends to imprison and break Roark, so he intends the same for Roark's comrades-in-spirit.

Only two kinds of power exist in life: the power to create and the power to destroy. Toohey neither seeks nor attains the power to create. He possesses only the power to destroy — and he is particularly concerned with using it against the able and successful individuals whom he envies. Toohey is a spiritual killer looking for an opportunity to become a physical one. He has the power to destroy. This power is limited, however, to conformists like Keating, who are looking for a master to follow — and to a panderer like Wynand, who allows Toohey a foothold in his organization because of the columnist's popularity.

But over an independent man like Roark, who has no need of him — who does not even think of him — Toohey has no power. His power is limited to those victims who voluntarily grant him their souls or, at least, a beachhead in their lives. Those who grant Toohey nothing, like Roark and Dominique, are in no danger from him. That Toohey's destructive capacity is limited is true — but it is a relatively minor point.

The major point is that Toohey has no power to create. Ayn Rand's claim is that evil is irrational; it does not focus on reality, seeking to build, create, or grow; it focuses only on other men, seeking to enslave, control, and destroy. She calls this point the impotence of evil.

Evil men are capable only of destruction, never of construction. They can tear down; they cannot build up. Toohey succeeds in destroying The New York Banner , but is incapable of recreating it after Wynand closes it. Any "victory" won by evil men is empty. They are incapable of creativity and — despite the number of souls they conquer, innocent lives they destroy, or dollars they loot — their lives are miserable.

As Toohey tells Keating, "Enjoyment is not my destiny. Roark is a happy man. He creates value by bringing into the world new designs and structures.