The Death of a Dream
How far are you willing to go to achieve your dreams? Become a criminal? Lock yourself away from the rest of the world? Even live in an illusion? Just how much are we truly willing to sacrifice? Well, two novels try to show us just how far a human will go through two very complex and tragic figures. Jay Gatsby from “The Great Gatsby” By F. Scott Fitzgerald, a wealthy, suave but mysterious gentleman who wanted nothing more than the love of a woman to complete his American Dream, while the other, Holden Caulfield, from J.D Salinger’s “The Catcher In The Rye”, a feisty young spitfire who constantly rejected society in order to live his own version of the American Dream, wanting …show more content…
Money, parties, fancy suits, class; these were the attributes Gatsby always showed to the world. Appearance was everything to him, showing off with his fancy clothes, and his big yellow car. In his mind, how could he have his American dream if he looked like just some nobody? After selling his soul to the devil for Daisy, for his dream, he just it had to come true. So, he made himself look like the man he believed he was destined to be. In being the rich millionaire, the war hero, and the extravagant party host, he could look at himself and see Jay Gatsby, not that poor farm boy from North Dakota, not James Gatz, never again. Holden could have cared less about appearances. In his life he saw the idea of keeping up appearances change people from vivacious and innocent, into conceited and pretentious fakes, just another cog into the machine society had become in his eyes. People followed whatever they were told, so he rebelled. So he smoked, he drank, he cursed and didn’t care about school or his life beyond that. Holden wasn’t going to be another brick in the wall, and was innocent in his own eyes and always would be, despite being a corrupted version of youth to others. With one look at Gatsby, you’d see the urbane lie, never the truth and in Holden always the coarse truth, never the …show more content…
To Holden Caulfield, the idea of having a loving wife and kids was all but as dead as his little brother. He saw life for the way it truly was, not the fairy tale Gatsby forced himself to see. Holden saw life as a dark and desolate wasteland with the only good thing in it was his brother Allie, and with reality snatching his little brother away from him, why would he want to live in a world of phonies that only cared about conforming to the factory mindset of society? So, he stayed with the idea that life was nothing without his innocence and isolated himself from the world cause in the end what was hope good to him if it couldn’t let him be like Allie? If it couldn’t bring him closer to the kids? If it couldn’t help him be the “Catcher in The Rye”? If these protagonists ever met; neither would see the people each thought they were. Gatsby would see a rude young man who never grew up and complained about life rather than doing something about it, and Holden would see a fake who lived in his own lie and never faced
How far are you willing to go to achieve your dreams? Become a criminal? Lock yourself away from the rest of the world? Even live in an illusion? Just how much are we truly willing to sacrifice? Well, two novels try to show us just how far a human will go through two very complex and tragic figures. Jay Gatsby from “The Great Gatsby” By F. Scott Fitzgerald, a wealthy, suave but mysterious gentleman who wanted nothing more than the love of a woman to complete his American Dream, while the other, Holden Caulfield, from J.D Salinger’s “The Catcher In The Rye”, a feisty young spitfire who constantly rejected society in order to live his own version of the American Dream, wanting …show more content…
Money, parties, fancy suits, class; these were the attributes Gatsby always showed to the world. Appearance was everything to him, showing off with his fancy clothes, and his big yellow car. In his mind, how could he have his American dream if he looked like just some nobody? After selling his soul to the devil for Daisy, for his dream, he just it had to come true. So, he made himself look like the man he believed he was destined to be. In being the rich millionaire, the war hero, and the extravagant party host, he could look at himself and see Jay Gatsby, not that poor farm boy from North Dakota, not James Gatz, never again. Holden could have cared less about appearances. In his life he saw the idea of keeping up appearances change people from vivacious and innocent, into conceited and pretentious fakes, just another cog into the machine society had become in his eyes. People followed whatever they were told, so he rebelled. So he smoked, he drank, he cursed and didn’t care about school or his life beyond that. Holden wasn’t going to be another brick in the wall, and was innocent in his own eyes and always would be, despite being a corrupted version of youth to others. With one look at Gatsby, you’d see the urbane lie, never the truth and in Holden always the coarse truth, never the …show more content…
To Holden Caulfield, the idea of having a loving wife and kids was all but as dead as his little brother. He saw life for the way it truly was, not the fairy tale Gatsby forced himself to see. Holden saw life as a dark and desolate wasteland with the only good thing in it was his brother Allie, and with reality snatching his little brother away from him, why would he want to live in a world of phonies that only cared about conforming to the factory mindset of society? So, he stayed with the idea that life was nothing without his innocence and isolated himself from the world cause in the end what was hope good to him if it couldn’t let him be like Allie? If it couldn’t bring him closer to the kids? If it couldn’t help him be the “Catcher in The Rye”? If these protagonists ever met; neither would see the people each thought they were. Gatsby would see a rude young man who never grew up and complained about life rather than doing something about it, and Holden would see a fake who lived in his own lie and never faced