Similarities Between Do You Know Where You Are And The Great Gatsby

At its core, the American Dream is simply about possibility––it makes no guarantees. It’s an alluring but elusive ideal. Take an Impressionist painting, you can admire it from a distance, but as you get closer, it becomes incoherent. You lose sight of the big picture (literally). The same is true of the American Dream; you can admire it as a concept, but as you get closer, what was so clearly compelling begins to dissolve. You are absorbed in the pursuit of something fleeting––a mirage, just out of reach. What’s next when you have everything and are still left wanting? Jay McInerney’s It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are? and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby explore the quest for fulfillment in the upper class—i.e., the American
The narrator’s inner monologue reveals his misery despite his attempts to brush over it with drugs, alcohol, and sex. “[A]ny beautiful girl, especially one with a full head of hair, would help you stave off this creeping sense of mortality” (McInerney137). The narrator is using superficial pleasure to fill a void, but he admits that his methods only achieve a temporary end. The unusual narrative style allows the reader to understand this secret realization before the narrator himself does and to anticipate his struggle as the evening progresses: “Go home. Cut your losses. Stay. Go for it.” (138-39). The pleasure-seeker in him wins out, opting to keep on bumping coke and pursuing women. Witnessing his pathetic defeat makes the story all the more upsetting. The part of the narrator that identifies with Tad Allagash represents the futile search for “better” ––bigger thrills, flashier parties, hotter girls. He muses, “[T]here is always the likelihood that you are missing something, that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are. You are awed by this strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of pleasure. You want to be like that” (136). This hedonistic attitude
Like McInerney’s narrator, Gatsby tries and fails to satisfy his longing with money. Fitzgerald uses a peripheral narrator, Nick Carraway, to paint Gatsby’s heartache from the viewpoint of the one other person who knows his past, giving the audience a unique insight into the “constant, turbulent riot” in his heart (Fitzgerald, 99). At one point, Nick comments, “I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his [Gatsby’s] broken heart” (67). While Gatsby himself might try to hide his feelings to maintain his public façade, Nick’s unbiased narration reveals his true nature and his belief that wealth can buy happiness. Later, after Gatsby learns that Daisy did, in fact, love Tom, Nick remarks, “He left, feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her” (152). It was not enough that Daisy professed her love for Gatsby, she needed to “annul” her love for Tom. Nick’s deep understanding of his friend makes him an almost omniscient narrator. He communicates not only Gatsby’s devastation but also his tragic faith in the empty American Dream that has failed him so miserably: that anything is possible with hard work and social