F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby is an absolutely American character: a deviant and romantic idealist; tenacious but sensitive; ostentatious but nostalgic. At the center is a transcendental desire, and for this reason he is never fully brought into focus as a character. For the “Great” Gatsby, Daisy is the vision of an ideal, closely linked to the past, and, to this end, Gatsby is a victim of his own creation. In light of Gatsby's lonely death, the question remains whether The Great Gatsby is ultimately a criticism of Gatsby or his dream. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay To consider such a question, it is helpful to adopt a perspective that treats human nature with almost biblical sensitivity, analyzing it by identifying aspects of reality and human nature that make us see both differently. This is what Tolstoy offers the reader. Pierre Bezukhov of War and Peace seems to embody the kind of vitality that Gatsby lacks. Although Pierre wanders aimlessly among half-hearted pursuits for nearly half the novel, once he finds an image to fill the void in his soul, he is elevated to a higher spiritual plane. If we consider two essential moments of these novels – one each in War and Peace and one in The Great Gatsby – we find their protagonists launched towards higher spiritual planes by the force of a satisfied cosmic longing. Careful examination – of what is at stake for each character, and how realizing their dreams quenches their inner longing – will serve to illuminate the significantly divergent destinies of Pierre and Gatsby. of the novel we first hear the story of Jay Gatsby's birth: from the ashes of his much less glamorous former self. James Gatz was a rather ordinary character of rural, middle-class origins. But Jay Gatsby is a prodigious example of self-creation, not only for his improbable rise to the highest rungs of society – we are invited to forget his somewhat adulterous methodology – but for the effort he makes to generate a compliant identity to the dictates of his mind. eye. Fitzgerald characterizes Gatsby, in his moment of self-generation, as “a son of God,” immaculately conceived, founder of his own image, omnipotent in his ability to shape himself according to his own imagination. Indeed, James Gatz brings his idea of ​​himself to life; “Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, was born from his Platonic conception of himself.” With sublime generative power, James Gatz imbues ideological aspirations with earthly existence, and thus Gatsby is born. It shapes itself according to a perfect and immutable ideal. That Platonic ideals are ultimately inaccessible to those who walk in the world of sensation and instability escapes Gatsby's instinct toward his future glory. to the earth, they consider real what is in reality only an illusion, a shadow of images that their eyes cannot perceive. Platonic ideals become imperfect on their journey to earthly terms, where all things are unstable, ever-changing, and subject to time and death. The same goes for Gatsby's desire to mold himself into an ideal, revealing the arrogance of trying to embody a perfect being. In fact it is only the shadow of an ideological conception, less than the perfect, eternal and immutable image it seeks to generate. This is made more evident when Gatsby remembers his first kiss with his beloved Daisy, when his fantasy is ruined as soon as it becomes reality. As much as he may pretend – indeed, as he does throughout the novel – Gatsby cannot live as a self-made creation. He's a victim of his past, just like we all areus. And while it finds a place in the American upper class of the 1920s, it is also its prey: chewed up, spat out unceremoniously cast aside. If both Gatsby and Pierre are misfits in the social circles they inhibit, Pierre is more willingly so. Pierre Bezukhov is an outsider to the Russian upper class, his awkward and unassuming ways only overlooked when his bastard son comes into his father's substantial inheritance. In himself and those around him, Pierre feels the transformation that wealth offers him: “Previously, Pierre had constantly felt… that his observations, which seemed intelligent to him as he prepared them in his imagination, became stupid not as soon as he spoke to them out loud…Now everything he said was fascinating. Welcomed as he is into high society, niceties cannot serve to calm the turbulence in Pierre's soul due to the insincerity of this world of appearances: this world where "'the stupidest woman in the world... appears to people as the height of intelligence and refinement,'” and everyone bows before her. Haunted by evil and lies, Pierre is unable to actively participate in life. Despite his existential restlessness – the unanswered questions and doubts, the lack of meaning and inspiration in life – Pierre still has to live. Self-preservation motivates him to subdue these investigations with sensory pleasures: “It was too frightening to be under the weight of all the insoluble questions of life, and he devoted himself to the first amusements that came to him, only to forget them. " Pierre attributes an enigmatic quality to the “questions of life”. This is equivalent to tacitly admitting that there is no solution to the most basic question: why should I live? It would therefore seem that Tolstoy interprets Pierre's anxiety as arising not from the inability to produce satisfactory answers, but from the lack of an adequate distraction. Pierre and Gatsby share the label of outsiders and a profound struggle for belonging , we find a moment where Pierre and Gatsby's ideas about themselves find fulfillment in relation to the object of their love. These instances are both exemplified on specific and important occasions in their respective novels. Furthermore, these profound relationships combine a cosmic desire with a mortal embodiment of that desire. After these experiences, these men are simply no longer the same. And while both moments offer a reprise of the eternal question in the form of mortal love, these men are distinguished by their aftermath. relationship with these moments of clarity. Gatsby spends the rest of his life trying to recapture what he felt when the stars aligned over his first kiss with Daisy, while the rest of Pierre's life is propelled forward by his enduring image of Natasha, who fills the part of him once occupied by uncertainty. . To discern the relationships that Gatsby and Pierre cultivate with these vital revelations, we must first investigate what is revealed in the moments themselves. Nick Carraway traces the creation of Jay Gatsby to that moment, at the dawn of winter, when Gatsby kissed for the first time. Daisy under the bright stars. He calls the language that Gatsby uses in recalling his memory frightening in its “sentimentality” – Gatsby's words are incredible precisely to the extent that they are poetic. Walking together, Daisy and Gatsby arrive in that immense and pure place "where there were no trees and the pavement was white in the moonlight". The cosmic excitement in the force of the changing seasons echoes the longing Gatsby feels towards his love. There is a palpable emotion in the air:“mysterious excitement,” a “movement among the stars.” The imagery connects human desire with the concerns of nature: cosmic issues seem in tune with Gatsby's emotion, in turn suggesting that there is a natural similarity between the threshold Gatsby wishes to cross and the inevitable changing of the seasons. It's as if the world around him has been preparing for this moment in Gatsby's life, and knows it, understands his insatiable desire. This anticipation finds expression in Gatsby's esteem for the powers and forces that aligned to facilitate his incarnation. In a moment that could not have lasted long, when Gatsby knows that his kiss with Daisy is fast approaching, his soul prepares for a great rise. Daisy is the substance of his dream, in which forces work to form a ladder that "mounted in a secret place above the trees - he could climb up it... and suck the gruel of life, swallow the incomparable milk of wonder ". There is no doubt in Gatsby's mind that this moment will form the axis of the rest of his life's ambitions. It is clear that when he drinks the elixir of wonders he will be forever and irrevocably changed. But perhaps the great Jay Gatsby does not fully realize how much this morsel of perfection will irremediably damage his propensity for fantasy, ruined as soon as those fantasies become corporeal. Gatsby hesitates. As Daisy wishes, she wishes to bring out the feeling in her soul at the image of his face approaching hers. Perhaps he also hesitates in light of the price he would have to pay to achieve his goal: he knew that when he kissed the girl, and forever united his unspeakable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never again be as wild as the mind of a God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck by a star. Then he kissed her. At the touch of his lips she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Gatsby lingers as long as he can, engaged in the activity of listening to the sublime vibrations of the cosmic universe, before sealing his commitment to a single time. -resistant role. To marry his “unspeakable visions” with Daisy's “perishable breath” is to conjoin Gatsby's Platonic idea of ​​himself with a particular moment in time – when that self touches the earth and Gatsby kisses Daisy. Once sealed this union cannot be changed and Gatsby loses the power of self-creation. Although he created his own Platonic idea, from that moment on he will remain trapped in his embodiment, in this single moment in time. That sublime generative power, that omnipotence in its ability to shape itself, are victims of Gatsby's pastoral longing. Both in this moment and in Nick's final assessment, Gatsby seems obsessed with recovering something from the past. To the extent that he continues to move forward on the trajectory of his life, Gatsby is also irremediably tied to his past, “incessantly brought back” into it. Daisy's kiss deals a death blow to Gatsby's desire to preserve an innocent and yet unexplored world, binding his noble ideals to the changing flesh. His mind can never again run wild “like the mind of a God” because it has been made corporeal: embodied, fixed, locked in his first union with Daisy. Pierre's soul rises to equally high levels in his interaction with Natasha after she breaks down. since her engagement to Prince Andrew. Pierre is discouraged by Natasha's outward display of desperation, by her sense that nothing makes sense. Perhaps because Pierre shares this feeling, he comforts Natasha with a “voice so gentle, tender, sincere” that she cries tears of gratitude. At first Pierre surpriseseven himself with his sudden burst of emotion, confused by the feelings growing in his chest. With a tender look, Natasha leaves feeling comforted for the first time in days. Pierre doesn't know what to do next: "Where to go?" Pierre wondered. 'Where can I go now? Not at the club or on visits." All the people seemed so pitiful, so poor compared to the feeling of tenderness and love she felt, compared to that softened and grateful look she had given him at the last moment through her tears. Having felt such a deep love connection with Natasha, everything else seems incredibly insignificant to Pierre. Until now he had not realized that his soul could rise to the point of reaching the feeling of the sublime. There seemed to be nothing useful in his mundane surroundings. Now he can only look at the world around him with pity and poverty of spirit. But in his next gesture, ordering his driver to take him home, Pierre reveals an internal transformation. His “joy-breathing chest” breathes in the new air around him, immersing himself in a brighter spiritual realm where, even in spite of doubts, life is definitely worth living. Rather than finding everything vile and insignificant compared to his soul's pleasure, Pierre uses Natasha's image to give his approach to life a newfound sense of purpose. The bright comet of 1812 travels across the starry sky above him, echoing the new heights of his soul. The comet, which was supposed to foreshadow destruction, evokes a sense of calm in Pierre, protecting him from the "offensive volatility of everything earthly." As they say, having discovered the “why” of life, Pierre is ready to tolerate any “how”. We imagine Pierre standing sub specie aeterni, the “huge expanse of the starry night” closer due to the comet's proximity to the earth, the void in his heart filled by his closeness to Natasha. A careful examination of the language Pierre uses to describe the comet's journey across the sky demonstrates the motivation he gains from this sublime feeling. His soul follows the same “parabolic course” as that “bright star”. In awe of this cosmic moment, Pierre's inner longing sympathizes with an event that is at once of this world and yet resonates with a universal energy. It seemed to him that “this star fully responded to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, which was now blossoming into new life.” In this moment of unity between Pierre's newly discovered sense of eternal purpose and cosmic greatness, his soul is reborn. It is filled with the image of Natasha, rooted in time by the most fixed historical event of the novel - the great comet of 1812. The comet also notices Pierre's inner development: having flown with unspeakable speed through immeasurable space on its parable Naturally , [the comet] suddenly, like an arrow piercing the earth, seemed to have struck here the once chosen spot in the black sky and stood still, with its tail raised energetically, its white light shining and playing among the innumerable more twinkling stars. Pierre, this comet's odyssey is yours. Having scoured vast distances, “traveled through immeasurable spaces,” he lands at this moment, hovering in the dark sky. In its stillness, the contented comet shines brightly and with an energetic spirit. That the comet has traveled a “parabolic” path evokes a metaphor for Pierre's inner journey and draws attention to the alignment that is occurring as disparate events – “countless other stars” – are brought into balance. This is a moment of renewal, when Pierre conceives a hope that encourages his soul and pushes him forward in the course of., 2007.