Hamlet and Gatsby Comparison

Love is an essential part of life. Every individual wants to be loved, and needs someone to love. It is an element that is fundamental to the well-being of all human kind; it is that magic that can heal wounds. However love also has the capacity to traumatize a person if it is extracted from their life. While we all wish to experience love, many of us tend to find the often inevitable detachment to be quite painful. In the novel The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby's longing for Daisy Buchanan leads him to his own downfall. Similarly in the novel Hamlet, Hamlet's extreme love for his father and his hatred towards his mother play a major role in his tragedy. In these works, there are a number of motivating factors that contribute to the downfall of the main characters- obsession, hatred, and the wanting to be accepted – but ultimately it is love that leads to the demise of Gatsby and Hamlet.
Hamlet loved his father, King Hamlet, and it was his death that broke young Hamlet's heart. It is the love he had for his father that brought him to his doom. After King Hamlet's death he appeared as a ghost moving through the castle at one o'clock every morning. When the guards and Horatio, Hamlet's best friend, noticed this ghostly figure, Horatio quite intelligently believed that he could get the ghost to speak with Hamlet. The next day the two guards, Horatio, and young Hamlet were present to speak to the ghost of King Hamlet. The ghost told Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius, his brother, who had been sworn in as the new king and married his wife, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. After hearing this, young Hamlet was asked to avenge his father’s death, but in doing so his mother was to remain unharmed. Hamlet, being the loving and devoted son he was, and unable to accept Claudius as the leader to replace his father, accepted King Hamlet’s request. After this encounter, young Hamlet refused to tell the guardsman and Horatio what happened but made it known that he would act like a