The Great Gatsby Movie And Book Comparison Essay

Going through school, the books we had to read were universally terrible. No one, let alone a high school student, wants to read a book originally written on a pot, or the book version of Sons of Anarchy, or an allegorical book about an economic system that doesn't exist anymore. Into The Wild drove me crazy as a Boy Scout, with the protagonists intentional disregard for commonly accepted outdoor safety procedures, and The Great Gatsby was a better movie. The only book that I liked, and liked a lot, was The Things They Carried. It is a bizarre book, but I’m pretty sure that's what appealed to me about it, aside from the fact that it was about a bunch of young guys who were sent to a foreign country and told to shoot stuff. When I read …show more content…
It was due to the fact that when I was watching The rest of the show, I felt like I was Don Draper. And in that instant, when the camera panned back, away from Don’s smiling face, and the “I want to buy the world a Coke” ad started playing, I felt that feeling. But when the credit rolled, and I felt like crying, I knew that nothing would ever be the same.
Now, this essay has not been about the book that I started this by talking about. But they are not different. There are a lot of similar themes, and if Don Draper was in Vietnam, he would have written, or at least experienced something similar. But I was the one who read the book, and I was the one who watched the show, and I must be the one to answer the question, why did they affect me like this? The answer is identity.
There was a story in The things they carried, about a soldier who convinces his girlfriend to hitch a ride on a cargo aircraft out to their squad. She starts cooking and cleaning, reminding the soldiers of home, but eventually starts to become part of the forest, and then joins the Viet Cong. There is something that appeals to me about that kind of, vanishing into the