How To Survive In The Great Gatsby
Every aspect of life depends on one’s ability to survive. The extent to which one can assess and analyse a situation can be as serious as the matter of life or death, or simply choosing one’s outfit of the day. Anthony Doerr and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels All The Light We Cannot See and The Great Gatsby utilise survival to illuminate the effects of an oppressive society.
All The Light We Cannot See is based on two children in the midst of World War II. Werner, a German boy is coming of age and with his gift for understanding machinery, he is taken from his orphanage and inserted into a Hitler Youth Academy. When Werner is whisked away to the academy he “never felt such a hunger to belong” Doerr (139) wanting to “strip away his weakness” and “eat country and breathe nation” (Doerr 137), This longing to belong with …show more content…
Marie-Laure also later finds herself helping Madame Manec, her uncle’s housekeeper, through the “Old Ladies’ Resistance Club” (Doerr 252) secretly spreading German secrets via bread loaves and writing “Free France Now” on “every five-franc note” (Doerr 253). Radio transmitters have a strong presence throughout the book because their prevalence is apparent. Marie-Laure later mans the radio in her uncle’s attic reading her book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In this, she indirectly helps Werner, who is suffering from a mild anxiety attack when he first hears her speaking over radio. With the ever-present dread of World War II looming overhead throughout the novel, listening to Marie-Laure’s “crisp french accent” became a subtle form escapism bringing him back to his childhood when he was sitting “in his attic dormer, clinging to a dream he does not want to leave” with the simple “roll of her R’s, and drawing out of her S’s” (Doerr 392). The irony throughout the novel is the two protagonists should technically be enemies, seeing
All The Light We Cannot See is based on two children in the midst of World War II. Werner, a German boy is coming of age and with his gift for understanding machinery, he is taken from his orphanage and inserted into a Hitler Youth Academy. When Werner is whisked away to the academy he “never felt such a hunger to belong” Doerr (139) wanting to “strip away his weakness” and “eat country and breathe nation” (Doerr 137), This longing to belong with …show more content…
Marie-Laure also later finds herself helping Madame Manec, her uncle’s housekeeper, through the “Old Ladies’ Resistance Club” (Doerr 252) secretly spreading German secrets via bread loaves and writing “Free France Now” on “every five-franc note” (Doerr 253). Radio transmitters have a strong presence throughout the book because their prevalence is apparent. Marie-Laure later mans the radio in her uncle’s attic reading her book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In this, she indirectly helps Werner, who is suffering from a mild anxiety attack when he first hears her speaking over radio. With the ever-present dread of World War II looming overhead throughout the novel, listening to Marie-Laure’s “crisp french accent” became a subtle form escapism bringing him back to his childhood when he was sitting “in his attic dormer, clinging to a dream he does not want to leave” with the simple “roll of her R’s, and drawing out of her S’s” (Doerr 392). The irony throughout the novel is the two protagonists should technically be enemies, seeing