In The Fountainhead, the imagery depicted seems to carry a bold frontier, the “True American Life”. The opening scene, Howard Roark stands at the edge of a cliff at a quarry, with a lake at the bottom. The cliffs are portrayed as "a frozen explosion of granite" that has "burst in flight to the sky over motionless water." The stone glows, "wet with sun rays." The world seems "suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff." The scene seems to be too ideological to come from a philosopher.
When Roark walks down an empty Manhattan street late at night, Rand outlines the scene in vivid imagery: “A long street stretched before him, its high banks coming close together ahead, so narrow that he felt as if he could spread his arms, seize the spires and push them apart. He walked swiftly, the pavements as a springboard throwing his steps forward. He saw a lighted triangle of concrete suspended somewhere hundreds of feet above the ground. He could not see what stood below, supporting it; he was free to think of what he'd want to see there and what he would have made to be seen... A lonely traffic light hung far ahead, a spot of red in a bleak darkness. The old houses crouched low to the ground, hunched under the weight of the sky. The street was empty and hollow, echoing to his footsteps. He went on, his collar raised, his hands in his pockets. His shadow rose from under his heels, when he passed a light, and brushed a wall in a long black arc, like the sweep of a windshield wiper.”
In the last scene, Dominique is presented as having gone to visit the construction site of the world's tallest building (designed by Roark); Rand details Dominique's trip up a small outside elevator to the top “She rose above the broad panes of shop windows. The channels of streets grew deeper, sinking. She rose above the marquees of movie theaters, black mats held by spirals of color. Office windows streamed past her, long belts of...