Rand was deliberately exposing her own flaws?? I don't think so, because that would have meant the whole novel was its own opposite, and that would border on farce. Rand was not farcical.

But I do think Rand was conflicted, at some level, maybe subconscious or even below that, because Eddie was one of two prominent characters who did have some "human" qualities, the other being Cheryl.

(I'm not sure if a "spoiler alert" is even necessary or appropriate for this thread, but I'm used to book discussion boards where failure to issue an alert is practically grounds for the equivalent of tombstoning!)

I remember being stunned when Cheryl was, in soap opera terms, written out of the story. Why, I wondered, did Rand get rid of her just when she (Cheryl) "saw the light"? It seemed stupid at the time, and it seems even more stupid now that I know more about storytelling -- and propaganda. Cheryl was the placeholder for the reader who needed to be "converted" to Objectivism, the person who fell for the superficial glitter of the falsely rich and morally bankrupt. Yet by disposing of her right at the moment of conversion, Rand was essentially saying the Objectivist system didn't have room for converts, just as it didn't have room for the Eddie Willerses of the world, meaning "the rest of us," not even if we were devoted Objectivists in thought, word, and deed. This amounts to preaching to a predestined choir, because no one else is worthy of being saved. (This, imho, makes Objectivism more akin to a religion than to a philosophy, and certainly removes it further from anything resembling economic theory.)

When I went back and read Eddie's last scene this afternoon, I discovered another tidbit of some interest, somewhat forgotten but not entirely. Eddie encounters a group of refugees in wagons -- a suggestion that at the collapse of the "collective" economy, the populace will be reduced to pre-industrial barbarism -- and they are described thusly --

The men of that caravan -- thought Eddie indifferently -- looked too mean-minded to become the founders of a secret, free settlement, and not mean-minded enough to become a gang of raiders; they had no more destination to find than the motionless beam of the headlight; and, like that beam, they would dissolve somewhere in the empty stretches of the country.

These were ordinary people, people "from Imperial Valley, California," who had been displaced in the collapse. They were not only expendable in Rand's universe -- as was Cheryl, as was Eddie -- but they were meaningless.

In the meantime, the real "founders of a secret, free settlement" were listening to symphonies and rewriting the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade. . . "

Since Eddie knew nothing about the people in the other "imperial" valley, the irony was Rand's and I can't imagine how it could be anything but intentional. Furthermore, the fact that Rand gave none of these ordinary people -- including Eddie -- any potential for surviving meant that she didn't think they were capable of it. They would simply die or disappear or kill each other or whatever, leaving a pristine wilderness for the intellectuals to repopulate like some Garden of Eden. (One assumes they would have children who would, from birth, be Objectivists with no flaws, no runny noses, no sibling rivalries, no jealousies over prom dresses. . .)

But the worst part of the Eddie situation was that Rand didn't let Dagny have any concern for Eddie. Dagny never wondered what happened to him; she didn't care enough to give him a single thought, and neither did Rand.

But neither did Rand give Eddie's end any meaning, the way she tried to give Cheryl's departure some function, some importance. Cheryl had seen the error of her ways and that revelation shattered her. Eddie's loyalty got him . . . . nothing. That shouldn't have meshed with Rand's philosophy, if her philosophy had any room for the common man. It didn't. The extension, then, is that neither does Greenspan's: the "objective" is to erase the common people and make the world safe for the elites.

So I guess my response would be that I think Rand had to let go of Eddie because there was no place for the likes of him -- loyal worker bees -- in the "new" world, but I'm not sure that it was completely a conscious decision. Then again, maybe it was, but I don't think her intention was to point out her own flaws.