Boats Against the Current vs. Roaring Seaward; Gender Roles in Confronting the Past Throughout Colum McCann’s novel Let The Great World Spin and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby characters are struggling to reconcile with the past, which causes a residual effect on the present. Within this theme, the women often find recovery in confronting the past, while the male characters fall short of reconciliation due to a lack of acceptance. Jay Gatsby, much like Corrigan, attempts to assuage his past by making it the focus of his present. Contrastly, Solomon Soderberg and Gloria cope with the past by ignoring the painful memories and emotions that come with it. However as McCann’s novel develops, Gloria, similar to Solomon’s wife Claire, eventually
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In the present, their lives are ever consumed in trying to reconcile with a lasting void from their past. Gatsby is a character who refuses to believe that the past cannot be repeated. He says to Nick Carraway, “‘Can’t repeat the past?... Why of course you can!’” (Fitzgerald 110). Gatsby holds on to precious memories of his time with Daisy and therefore, is unable move on and live in the present. The narrator notes, “[Gatsby] talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps… His life had been confused and disordered since then” (Fitzgerald 110). Recovering the past becomes such a deluded obsession for Gatsby that every aspect of his life leading up to the present is solely intended to win back Daisy. He never makes a decision without her in mind, and thus his life has no purpose without her in it. At the end of the novel, Gatsby dies never having reconciled with what was, all the while obsessively searching for the past in his future and neglecting to create any true meaning in his present life. When the narrator realizes that Gatsby will never be able to recover Daisy, he foreshadows Gatsby’s tragic death, “He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (Fitzgerald
In the present, their lives are ever consumed in trying to reconcile with a lasting void from their past. Gatsby is a character who refuses to believe that the past cannot be repeated. He says to Nick Carraway, “‘Can’t repeat the past?... Why of course you can!’” (Fitzgerald 110). Gatsby holds on to precious memories of his time with Daisy and therefore, is unable move on and live in the present. The narrator notes, “[Gatsby] talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps… His life had been confused and disordered since then” (Fitzgerald 110). Recovering the past becomes such a deluded obsession for Gatsby that every aspect of his life leading up to the present is solely intended to win back Daisy. He never makes a decision without her in mind, and thus his life has no purpose without her in it. At the end of the novel, Gatsby dies never having reconciled with what was, all the while obsessively searching for the past in his future and neglecting to create any true meaning in his present life. When the narrator realizes that Gatsby will never be able to recover Daisy, he foreshadows Gatsby’s tragic death, “He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (Fitzgerald