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Steven Mallory's motive?

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In The Fountainhead, Steven Mallory becomes a shooter. He takes a shot at Toohey. Why? He is silent about it. Roark even asks him about it directly later, and he says that he doesn't like talking about it.

I wonder if he purposely missed? Or did people take him down before he could fire more? Had it gone to trial, I wonder if he would he have had a courtroom speech prepared? Why would he remain silent an not let his why be known? Does he show any remorse, regret, that he did something wrong? What if he would have killed him, was he trying to? So many questions left unanswered when not brought to trial. But he does talk about somethings, like the drooling beast talk.

Toohey refers to it as "assassination". Done in the style of an operetta. ?

Edited by intellectualammo
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You seem to assume that Mallory has the author's sympathy and that he speaks for her and acts on her behalf. He doesn't, so his behavior is not a problem that needs solving.

He pulls himself together later (or at least his wackola behavior ceases to figure in the story), but this hasn't happened when he shoots Toohey.

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I did not make such an assumption. Now that you brought it up, I wonder why Rand wrote it into the story then.

He did speak a little about it, I had a quote or two that may hold a client two, but it still leaves things largely unanswered. And as to why it was included. She did make cuts to the book before purchasing location after all, like Vesta Sunning, for example, why was this left and integrated into parts of the story? Why largely unanswered? Why did Roark and Dominique hangout with him knowing he was a shooter?

Oh, he said he did it because of what he had read that Toohey had written or something to that effect, then something about him thinking men like Roark didn't exist.

Edited by intellectualammo
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I think he functions in the story as a contrast to Roark. Seeing the evil in the world and not having a strong enough self to stand firm against it, he fell into dissolution, which climaxed in the shooting. Roark's example is strong enough to bring him back from the brink, but Mallory alone was not enough. Dominique is another kind of contrast, simply remaining aloof from the evil she sees instead of declining the way Mallory does. Howard and Dominique associate with him after the shooting because they're confident that he's reformed.

Peikoff says that Rand cut Dunning out the story because she was too much like Wynand and thus dispensable. Mallory is not redundant this way. Or the explanation may be simply that the cuts she made were enough to fit the paper quota and she didn't need to make any more.

I suspect that in addition she simply liked the idea of having a sculptor in the story and had taken certain images into her head that she was reluctant to give up. The statue of Dominique seems to come from the 1934 movie

1:50; I don't know what she thought of this movie, but she was a big fan of Dietrich), and the scene of architect, sculptor and model hanging out late at night at the construction site resembles one in FLl Wright's Autobiography, which she read and made notes on while gearing up to write her novel. Edited by Reidy
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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks, this part of your reply helped a lot:

" Seeing the evil in the world and not having a strong enough self to stand firm against it, he fell into dissolution, which climaxed in the shooting. Roark's example is strong enough to bring him back from the brink, but Mallory alone was not enough. "

How Roark viewed him as a sculptor was what brought him back in that scene with him and Roark when Mallory is "not all the way"-drunk when Roark meets Mallory for the first time. But, I still can't see why Mallory would be a shooter, not a writer, firing intellectual ammo off at the things he's reading that Toohey writes about, instead of real ammo at the man that wrote it. I wonder why it affected him the way it did anyways? He spoke of Toohey as being a person that he thinks knows the nature of the drooling beast, but still, I don't understand. Toohey did write about architecture, but that was seemingly just a vehicle for something else.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think that Mallory's action was more rational than Roark's (or maybe I should say less irrational). Mallory initiated force against only the novel's villain, where Roark, rather than taking his gripe directly to the person who was messing with him, initiated force and destroyed property owned by people with whom he did not have a contract to build, and against whom he perpetrated the fraud of passing off his work as someone else's.

J

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I think that Mallory's action was more rational than Roark's (or maybe I should say less irrational). Mallory initiated force against only the novel's villain, where Roark, rather than taking his gripe directly to the person who was messing with him, initiated force and destroyed property owned by people with whom he did not have a contract to build, and against whom he perpetrated the fraud of passing off his work as someone else's.

J

The explosion was a literary artifact to set up The Trial at which the protagonist presented his views and won the jury over.

In the real world, such move would have gotten Roarke at least ten years in the pen.

ruveyn1

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  • 2 months later...

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