Great Gatsby And Hamlet Comparison Essay

The Trials that Plague the Soul Misery loves company. This statement proves true when comparing the acclaimed works Yann Martel's Life of Pi, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and William Shakespeare's Hamlet, as all these classics contain the crucial element despair. Characters in the aforementioned novels and play, battle with deep despair and must sacrifice to survive in a world without loved ones to guide them. The characters are not the cause of their anguish, though it is the intense desire to change fate or unconscious change their being that is the fuel of their heartache. Suffering leads characters to instinctive and inexplicable acts, in order to create a picture perfect world or to simply survive. Hellen Keller once stated, …show more content…
Literary devices convey this maddening desperation to transform the characters suffering, and soon strains the characters mentally, physically and emotionally. Time, illusion versus reality, impulse and doubt, and loss are obstacles that consume the characters hopes and dreams of becoming morally strong, successful and ambitious, morphing themselves into something completely unrecognizable.

Illusion versus reality is a deadly obstacle faced by in the three works, Life of Pi, The Great Gatsby and Hamlet. A great factor in this obstacle is time. John Greene famously wrote in his acclaimed novel The Fault in Our Stars, "What a slut time is. She screws everybody”. This personification on time is extremely accurate as no matter how desperately we wish to recover lost time, or how deeply we wish to erase immoral deeds committed in the past it is impossible. This immense, irretrievable loss makes characters feel cheated, as John insinuates, and stimulates insanity. Characters are tempted to recreate the past, or rewrite history by creating an alternate scenario in which mistakes and sins do not exist. For instance, in Life of Pi,