Disillusionment is straightly defined as a feeling of disappointment resulting from the discovery that something is not as good as one believed it to be, according to the Oxford Dictionaries. Throughout The Sun Also Rises, and The Great Gatsby, motifs of decadence and its relationship with loss often reoccur in comparison, as the primary characters in each of the novels transpose this decadence differently. Whereas in The Great Gatsby the loss of decadence results in an emotional spiral, ultimately leading to death, characters in The Sun Also Rises react to this disenchantment by only complying with a greater degree of decadence.
Jay Gatsby, the main character in The Great Gatsby displays his loss of decadence by obsessing over an unattainable …show more content…
It seems as if the more they lost, the more they tried to compensate for it. Gatsby bought a mansion in hopes of not losing who he thought was the love of his life, devoting five years of his life to a sole woman. Gatsby bought the house so that “Daisy would be just across the bay… he half expected her to wander into one of his parties… but she never did” (Fitzgerald,79). In The Sun Also Rises, Robert Cohn had grown up in a very prosperous family, however in a very anti-Semitic time period, where he was forced to degrade himself, and lose everything. To compensate for this, Cohn would make up stories of his successes, which led Jake to believe that he “had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion” (Hemingway, 12). Another difference is what the characters would return to after the war. When Gatsby departed, he knew what he had left behind, and he had his mind set on claiming his prize once he returned from the war, but the characters in The Sun Also Rises had nothing to expect, nothing to look forward to. In fact, Gatsby had been keeping note of everything about Daisy in a scrapbook that he had created during the time he was at war, because he knew that was what he wanted when he returned. When he showed Daisy, Gatsby noted, “’Look at this… here is a lot of clippings about you.’ They stood side by side examining it” (Fitzgerald,
Jay Gatsby, the main character in The Great Gatsby displays his loss of decadence by obsessing over an unattainable …show more content…
It seems as if the more they lost, the more they tried to compensate for it. Gatsby bought a mansion in hopes of not losing who he thought was the love of his life, devoting five years of his life to a sole woman. Gatsby bought the house so that “Daisy would be just across the bay… he half expected her to wander into one of his parties… but she never did” (Fitzgerald,79). In The Sun Also Rises, Robert Cohn had grown up in a very prosperous family, however in a very anti-Semitic time period, where he was forced to degrade himself, and lose everything. To compensate for this, Cohn would make up stories of his successes, which led Jake to believe that he “had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion” (Hemingway, 12). Another difference is what the characters would return to after the war. When Gatsby departed, he knew what he had left behind, and he had his mind set on claiming his prize once he returned from the war, but the characters in The Sun Also Rises had nothing to expect, nothing to look forward to. In fact, Gatsby had been keeping note of everything about Daisy in a scrapbook that he had created during the time he was at war, because he knew that was what he wanted when he returned. When he showed Daisy, Gatsby noted, “’Look at this… here is a lot of clippings about you.’ They stood side by side examining it” (Fitzgerald,