Great Gatsby vs. Holden Caulfield

The Great Gatsby written By F.Scott Fitzgerald is a novel about people, mainly Gatsby’s idea of the ‘American dream’ which can be compared easily to The Catcher in the Rye By J.D Salinger. Nick and Jay Gatsby are similar to Holden Caulfield. Nick is like Holden in the fact that they both share ideas of having expectations of people and hope, even though society constantly lets them down with multiple examples showing how people act in their natural state. Gatsby and Holden are much alike because they both have these fond ideas of women and their illusion of their American dreams, with Holden its Jane and with Gatsby its Daisy but they are both disappointed when they realize their ideas are just ideas …show more content…

All the people that have shaped Holden and Gatsby are unaware that their actions can break the illusion an in instant and that they are what holds these men together as people. Gatsby and Holden have the greatest passion and have come so far in life and one person controls theirs fate, existence and sanity which is the irony of the situation. Holden likes to remember Jane as a sensitive, innocent girl with an odd approach to checkers this helps completes his theory that she is different from other. “... She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls, if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you…Jane was different...You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were. (Salinger Chpt.11)”.His illusion is broken when she goes out with Stradlater and he makes him think they were doing something. Holden gets a taste of who she really is and not who he has made her out to be. He starts to see that she is just a normal girl and this is one of the steps that lead to his breakdown. The green light at the end of Tom and Daisy’s Dock represents Gatsby illusion, to be with Daisy. The green light symbolizes hope and it also symbolizes the fact that he is so close yet so far away (across the lake) from his ideal having a future with daisy. “"Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now