The nature of the past in The Ice Palace and The Great GatsbyIn "The Ice Palace" and The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the nature of the past . It shows us that we can neither return nor escape from the past. In "The Ice Palace" he writes about the past of two different societies, the North and the South. In The Great Gatsby he writes about Daisy's relationships with two men, Tom and Gatsby. “In both of these stories some characters want to escape the past and others want to return to the past” (Pendelton, 37). These characters discover that neither is possible, that the past and present are intertwined. The first society Fitzgerald deals with in "The Ice Palace" is the North. Here people try to ignore the past. We see this when Harry Bellamy tells us that "Everyone has a father, and about half of us have grandparents. We don't go behind that" (Fitzgerald, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and Other Stories, 72). They have no interest in what came before. Their buildings are also new. An example of this is the library of the Bellamy house. Many books were unread, and the articles in them "all looked about fifteen years old" (71). The emblem of the buildings of the North is the ice palace, which represents winter and then melts. It is an attempt to build a building without a past, built fresh each time. In the southern cemetery, when Sally Carrol talks about Margery Lee, Harry Bellamy looks at the grave and says "There's nothing here" (68). For him gravestones have no reality beyond the immediate physical one. In the North the snow hides the gravestones, making each "a light shadow against light shadows" (80). The hiding of the gravestones demonstrates the North's attitude towards the past. They believe it is not important and should be ignored. Despite all these efforts, the North is unable to escape the past. The gravestones may be covered in snow, but they are still there. Eventually the snow will melt and everyone will be able to see them. Even the ice palace, the attempt to build a building without a past, falls victim to it. The last time an ice palace was built was in 1885, but it is still "populated with those shades of the Eighties""(80).