Comparing Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby And Tim O Brien
788 Words4 Pages
Michael Astourian
Mr. Boling
AP English
18 August 2015
Literary Analysis The books The Great Gatsby and The Things They Carried, written by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Tim O’Brien respectively, are two disparate novels written in styles of the same kindred. The former is written through the eyes of Nick, an Ivy League graduate looking to work as a stockbroker in the heart of New York. The latter, also written as a first-person narrative, is a personal account of the author himself as he describes his experiences in the Vietnam War. Both writers show literary prestige throughout their works and effectively convey their themes, although very differently, through the use of tone, diction, imagery, and variation in style. Throughout The Great Gatsby, Nick’s tone is critical and almost contemptuous. His constant skepticism and misanthropic comments…show more content… Fitzgerald is often histrionic in his use of imagery in that he tends to hyperbolize emotions and dark moments within his story. When Nick makes plans to have tea with Daisy, Gatsby arrives at his door, “pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.”(86) O’Brien is not very different in that he also emphasizes emotions, but instead he makes the story unique in that he likens these emotions to the items that the men traveled with and says them to be the real burden that they carried. Often times conflicts in the book are described through the items that the men needed to carry in order to survive. For example O’Brien describes that, “If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they knew to be bad, they carried everything they could. In certain heavily mined AOs, where the land was dense with Toe Poppers and Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a 28-pound mine