Essay Comparing The Great Gatsby And Paper Towns

“Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.” (Green 230). Both The Great Gatsby and Paper Towns convey the importance of imagining other individuals complexly. Rather than treating them as one dimensional, it is necessary for maintaining successful relationships to refrain from projecting a skewed version of true character onto one. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, an important message of seeing one’s genuine personality and makeup is conveyed with the hope to prevent conjuring products of the imagination in the place of real people. Jay Gatsby has been depicted in this novel alone as the son of god, a bootlegger, an obsessed lover, an “Oxford man”, but most importantly, he has been depicted as larger than life. Not only does he face the whisperings and rumors circulating about his life, his lovers, and his rise to power
Even Nick, the narrator and arguably the main character, shows a bias towards Gatsby’s nature while entertaining his self proclaimed honest recounting of events. Nick, among countless other nameless and faceless members of Gatsby’s uninvited entourage treat the rich differently. When it comes to West Egg and East Egg, those less blessed with seemingly endless riches tend to gaze upon the rich with wonder without understanding. The rich, in their eyes, seem untouchable, almost godlike. They can do anything, while avoiding consequences and spending inexhaustible wealth on innumerable belongings. That becomes the goal for the poorer- to become rich. To become happy. To become larger than life like those above them. When a goal such as that is finally reached, an inevitable letdown becomes reality. As Fitzgerald writes, “It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment” (Fitzgerald