The Fountainhead: Part 1: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

John Erik Snyte looks at Roark’s sketches, finds them “Radical but remarkable,” and wants him to start work at once on designing a department store. He asks one of his men to help get Roark set up, and he asks Roark if he can work on it all night. Roark agrees. Roark’s pencil trembles as he begins drawing, and he feels “anger at himself for the weakness of allowing this job to mean so much to him.”

Snyte is a prominent architect who has built in many styles. His strategy is to let his five designers battle it out for the winning design for each commission, and he then adds bits of the other four to the final design.  He believes that “[s]ix minds are better than one.” Roark is to be his “Modernistic” man, and Roark understands that he will never see “his work erected, only pieces of it, which he prefer[s] not to see.” Yet, he is “free to design as he wishe[s],” so he accepts it.

The building-trades union is on a strike. While most of the newspapers support the strikers, Wynand’s publications don’t—Francon knows it is because Wynand’s corporation owns the hotel where the strike started. Francon and Heyer are the architects for this hotel and Francon had hoped that it would open the door to more commissions for them from the Wynand group. This is why the strike makes him anxious—he worries that Wynand will blame him for the stalled project.

Francon snaps at Keating because of his worries, and Keating goes home in a bad mood. He calls Catherine and finds her voice soothing. He wants to see her but doesn’t want to talk about her uncle, Ellsworth Toohey, who is a strike sympathizer and will be speaking at a meeting that evening. Since Toohey writes a column called “One Small Voice” in Wynand’s Banner, some think he won’t appear at the meeting to avoid angering Wynand, while others say he’ll “sacrifice himself” and go, since he’s “the only honest man in print.”

When Keating goes to Catherine’s apartment, she isn’t home. He feels a sinking sense of loneliness take hold of him and then he goes to the meeting hall to look for her, where he finds her handing out pamphlets. He calls her a “fool” but Catherine is excited, and she tells him that Toohey’s decision to come here despite knowing it would anger Wynand makes her “believe in all human beings.”

Together, Keating and Catherine listen to a suave and cultured activist named Austen Heller speak. He talks in an unemotional way about how the state must have only minimal power over people, and that “the freedom to agree or disagree” is the foundation of society. He then calls Wynand “an exquisite bastard who has been rather noisy lately,” which worries Catherine because she fears Wynand will take out his frustration on Toohey.

Toohey is greeted by deafening applause from the crowds and he begins speaking in a voice that is full of emotion and that Keating thinks of as the “voice of a giant.” Keating thinks that he has “no need to know the meaning” of the words that Toohey is uttering and that “he would be led blindly anywhere” by that voice. Toohey calls for unity and says it is time for everyone to “merge his self in a great current.”

After the strike is settled, business booms once again at Francon and Heyer, and this is why Keating is surprised when he sees Francon come in looking upset one morning. Later that day, Keating sees a young woman at the office, who he thinks looks beautiful but cruel, and he discovers that it is Dominique Francon. In the Banner, she has written about one of the houses which Keating had designed, criticizing its flourishes and excesses. Keating hears her laughing coldly while Francon reprimands her for embarrassing his firm, and Keating is torn between the desire to meet her and to never see her again.