In Rand’s view, a plot can be defined as “a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.” ( RM 82) This is a definition that basically conforms to other attempts to define plot in terms of causality, as opposed to mere temporality or chronology. They disagree, however, in regard to what constitutes the ordering principles. Most critics agree that a plot involves the way the author orders the events of a story into a progressive and logically coherent pattern serving his specific discursive aims. In the case of a novel, such attention is on the most basic level a question of following the plot. Thus, to be properly appreciated, a good novel or play or poem requires, in a way parallel to Roark’s house, that we pay special attention to its structural composition. Although Rand believed that the pleasure derived from a literary work chiefly lay in its subject matter-in its presentation of exciting events and characters-she also believed that the full enjoyment of a literary work, qua art, was bound up with its success in integrating its diverse elements into an artistically satisfying whole. The kind of structural processing Roark here describes can be transferred to the act of appraising a work of literature.

As Roark explains, “Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands.” (136) Thus, when in The Fountainhead Austen Heller asks Howard Roark why he takes such pleasure in watching the construction of the house Roark has designed for him, Roark points out that it springs from one’s awareness of the building’s structure. Not only did she regard such integration as consistent with man’s need to translate experience into a cognitively coherent form, but she also saw it as a major source of aesthetic pleasure. Holding that an important purpose of art is “to unify man’s consciousness and offer him a coherent view of reality,” ( RM 73) she held up integration-the ordering of an artwork’s component parts into a unified and harmonious whole-as a central aesthetic virtue. In her writings on art, Ayn Rand put great emphasis on the value of structural unity in an artwork.

Atlas shrugged and the fountainhead