Eddie Willers

Eddie Willers is Special Assistant to the Vice-President in Charge of Operation at Taggart Transcontinental, Dagny Taggart's closest colleague, and the character with whom Atlas Shrugged opens and closes. He is the novel's portrait of the good man of ordinary ability: fully moral, entirely loyal, and without the creative capacity that distinguishes the strikers.

The competent ordinary man

Eddie's family served the Taggarts for three generations, and he grew up alongside Dagny. He is honest, hard-working and unswervingly devoted to the railroad, and Dagny relies on him more than on anyone else in the company. He is also, quietly, in love with her, and never says so.

Rand's use of the character is precise. The novel is frequently read as claiming that only genius has moral worth, and Eddie is the standing refutation inside the text: he possesses every virtue Objectivism identifies — honesty, integrity, independence of judgment, productiveness within his range — and none of the originating ability of a Galt or a Rearden. The novel treats him as a good man without qualification. What it does not do is treat ability and virtue as the same thing. See Virtues and Justice.

The cafeteria conversations

Eddie dines regularly in the employees' cafeteria with an anonymous track worker he finds unusually easy to talk to, and tells him, week by week, exactly which suppliers and contractors Dagny depends on. Those men are the next to disappear.

The worker is John Galt. The device is one of the novel's cruellest ironies — the most loyal man in the company is the strike's most productive source — and it is also an argument. Eddie is not a fool and is not being punished for a failing. He is being used because he cannot conceive of the thing that is happening, and he cannot conceive of it because identifying it would take the kind of abstract grasp the novel reserves for its originators.

The ending

The novel's last scene involving Eddie leaves him in the Arizona desert with a dead Taggart Comet, having failed to get the engine started, weeping over it as the crew abandons the train and the world outside goes dark. He is not rescued. Rand ends his story there.

This is the most disputed thing in the novel among readers sympathetic to it, and the forum returns to it regularly. The objection is direct: if Eddie has every virtue the philosophy names, why does the philosophy's own novel leave him to die on a stalled train while the strikers eat dinner in the valley?

The readings usually offered in reply are that the ending is not a verdict on Eddie but a statement of the strike's cost — that a collapse does not sort its victims by desert, and that pretending otherwise would have been the sentimental choice; that Eddie's fate is a consequence of the looters' actions rather than the strikers'; and that Rand deliberately declined the rescue precisely because a rescue would have let the reader off. The objection that survives all of these is that the strikers knew him, could have taken him, and did not.

The article records this as disputed rather than resolved. What is not in dispute is that Rand's treatment of Eddie throughout is one of unmixed respect, and that reading the ending as contempt for the average man does not fit a single scene he appears in.

Common misunderstandings

That Eddie represents the "common man" as a type Rand despised. The character is drawn with more affection than almost anyone in the book, and the novel's opening line is his.
That he is stupid for not identifying Galt. Nobody in the outside world identifies Galt, including Dagny, who is looking for him deliberately and with far more information.
That his unrequited love for Dagny is played for pathos. It is stated once, plainly, and never used to make him pitiable.
That his exclusion from the valley is a moral judgment. The strikers recruit men whose withdrawal stops the motor of the world. That is a criterion about leverage, not about worth. Whether it is an adequate answer is the disputed point above.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "The Goal of My Writing" and "The Nature of an Artist", The Romantic Manifesto. World Publishing, 1969.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 9.