Comparing The Great Gatsby And Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet

at Gatsby and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets explore the role of human aspirations and the quest to establish or maintain an identity against vastly different social contexts and in markedly different literary forms. While The Great Gatsby (TGG) develops an ironic, shifting but ultimately pessimistic if not cynical viewpoint on the nature of human aspirations and our likelihood of maintaining an individual identity against the range of social pressures, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets present a more idealistic and optimistic assessment of the role aspirations and identity can play in our lives if we approach them with courage and sincerity.

Fitzgerald explores aspirations and identity chiefly through the central figure of Jay Gatsby. Gatsby himself is an elusive and problematic figure we are made to view through a series of lenses, above all through the admiring but cynical and
Gatsby’s aspiration to win Daisy and achieve the perfect life, abolishing five years of life and reclaiming the Daisy he fell in love with as a young officer, is a bold plan Nick can’t help but admire. From his opening “Gatsby turned out all right in the end” to his closing words spoken to Gatsby across the sweep of his lawn, “They’re a rotten crowd . . .You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together”, Nick makes it clear that to him Gatsby is special, the shining star, out there above the rest because of his “extraordinary gift for hope”, a self-made man “who had come a long way to this blue lawn”, to be so close to his “dream”. While Nick would settle for a pragmatic affair with the careless new-age woman Jordan Baker or where others like Tom Buchanan cynically use people, leaving a trail of damage behind them, Gatsby