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Great Gatsby in Comparison to Catcher in the Rye Essay

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Great Gatsby vs. Holden Caulfield The Great Gatsby written By F.Scott Fitzgerald is a novel about people, mainly Gatsby’s idea of the ‘American dream’ which can be compared easily to The Catcher in the Rye By J.D Salinger. Nick and Jay Gatsby are similar to Holden Caulfield. Nick is like Holden in the fact that they both share ideas of having expectations of people and hope, even though society constantly lets them down with multiple examples showing how people act in their natural state. Gatsby and Holden are much alike because they both have these fond ideas of women and their illusion of their American dreams, with Holden its Jane and with Gatsby its Daisy but they are both disappointed when they realize their ideas are just ideas …show more content…

It was one of Those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it …it understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood , believe in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hope to convey. (Fitzgerald 48)” Even though Gatsby bootlegged liquor and ran over a lot of people to get where he was, he was viewed as in overall good person because he had a heart and had passion to do all those unjust activities just to get to daisy. A good example of this is although Holden had ‘bad’ self image , he was careless ,switched schools often and had little self respect they liked to view him as a good person overall because he wanted to save the innocence of children. “The Catcher in the Rye is a genuine initiation tale, even though it is only the candidate undergoing the ordeal who is conscious of what his final decision means; the real evidence of the decadence of his world is that the initiators who impose the ordeals upon him are too much wrapped up in themselves even to understand the meaning of their actions. (French)”. In the book, there are many people that have affected Holden’s life so deeply and they are unaware of this fact, like Allie. Allie is what makes Holden the way he is because of him Holden has taken a likeness to contain the innocence of children for them no to go out into reality because he doesn’t want to see children’s dreams to be shattered like

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