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Reverend Hale Character Analysis

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Characters who seem to be heroic, such as Reverend Hale in The Crucible, initially appear to be consistent and set in their beliefs become aware of their faults at a futile moment in the story. Reverend Hale comes to Salem in an attempt to purge the town of witches and demons. Inadvertently Hale causes the deaths and jailing of innocent people. At a later point in the story he returns to Salem and exclaims, “I have come to do the devil’s work. I come to counsel Christians they should belie themselves. There is blood on my head! Can you not see the blood on my head” (Miller 121). Although Hale never seemed to be a hero in the eyes of the reader he was a man of reason and knowledge who had come to Salem with good intentions. However, after …show more content…

Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald alludes to and questions many standard American beliefs. One of the most extreme cases that exemplifies his criticism is Gatsby’s fantastical description of what it would have been like to kiss Daisy when they had first known each other. “His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own,” Nick describes Gatsby’s vision, “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God” (Fitzgerald 110). Entrenched in Gatsby’s vast imagination is the idea that Daisy is flawless and the epitome of his goals. However irrational Gatsby’s mind is, he realizes that once he actually kissed her his idealistic version of her will disappear and he will realize her imperfections. This is is a perfect metaphor for Fitzgerald’s stance towards the American Dream, the unrealistic and heroic expectations of class mobility and the clean cut ideas about hard work and are, for the most part, theoretical. Fitzgerald realizes that in many cases, such as Gatsby’s, pining after an ideal yields nothing because of the impossibility of perfection. Fitzgerald ends the novel by attempting to describe the emptiness of the promise of the American Dream by writing, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”(Fitzgerald 180). The promise of success is endlessly beat down by the “current” that all people have to fight against. It is romantic and arguably foolish to attempt to break the odds and the safest and easiest route will always be to go backwards. The apparent futility of exerting effort is only counteracted by the existentiality of life, if there is no reason to try then why does life exist. Heroic ideas such as the American Dream are doomed to

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