In A Street Car Named Desire and The Great Gatsby, Tennessee Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald present characters who are destroyed by the worlds they live in. The settings of the stories prevent the protagonist’s dreams from being realized thus destroying their lives and later leading to their demise. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby fails to achieve the genuine love he spends his lifetime searching for because he ends up all alone. On the other hand, in A Street Car Named Desire, Blanche fails to find human compassion and kindness in the society she lived in. Therefore, the authors present characters who are destroyed by the worlds they lived in since they failed to reach their dreams. The characters are destroyed in by the societies they live in thus leading to their demise.
In The Great Gatsby, we meet Jay Gatsby, who is obsessed with Daisy Buchanan despite the fact that she is already married to someone else. In the story, Gatsby devoted his entire life pursuing Daisy, Tom Buchanan’s wife. Gatsby’s quest for Daisy makes him isolated from the people around him because he only lived for Daisy yet she rejected him. Gatsby’s pursuit led to a fragmentation of his life because he was rejected and never got any support from the people around him. For instance, Fitzgerald notes that he was around “careless people who smashed things and let other people clear their mess (Fitzgerald 102).” This is a statement that refers to Gatsby’s friends who should be supporting him. The society was only there for him during the parties, but could not help him in his endeavors; as a result, they were the cause of his demise. Before his death, Gatsby was all alone, and this is evident when the author writes, “Walked away and left him staring there watching over nothing” (Fitzgerald 178). The protagonists needed support from the society, but they all abandoned him in his delusions that later led to his demise. In fact, when he died, only a few people attended his funeral, yet many of them could be seen attending his parties.
In the A Street Car Named Desire, Blanche could not realize her idealized notions of love because the society could not allow her. Blanche lied about everything in her life and this led to her destruction. All she yearned for was acceptance from the people around her, and this led her into believing in her lies. After the death of her husband Alan Grey, she felt empty and so Blanche was trying to find love and care from the society. As a result, the people took advantage of her vulnerability, as she becomes a prostitute for sleeping with strangers in her search for love and belonging. Therefore, Blanche decides to lie about her past to have a better future. When Mitch discovered that Blanche lied to him, she says, “I didn’t lie in my heart,” because she did not come to reality in her delusions (Williams 2201). Her relationship with Mitch ended after he discovered her and this led to her destruction because even after all her lies, she could not find the love, compassion, and happiness that she desired. Even though Blanche had questioning characters, she never got the support she needed in the society. Instead, she was condemned by the society because of her lies behaviors thus leading to her ultimate destruction.
Both the characters, Gatsby and Blanche tried living their lives attempting to gain what was out of their reach, which led to their destruction. Gatsby and Blanche are protagonists who share the aspects of deception, delusion, and desire that led to their final destruction. They delude themselves that everything is fine with them, yet the situations in their lives were very unfavorable to them. In A Street Car Named Desire, Blanche delusions herself as a wealthy woman as well as younger than Stella, yet the reality is that she is not rich at all, and she was actually older than Stella was. Comparably, In The Great Gatsby, the protagonist deludes that he is the only man that Daisy lives and this makes him spend his life thinking that he will be with her in the future. The characters believe in their delusions, but never got any positive support from the people around them and this leads to their destruction.
Gatsby and Blanche are not the cause of their destruction because all they needed was love and support from the society. Nonetheless, they did not receive any care and support during their delusions and thus were destroyed by the world’s they lived in. It is evident in the two novels that the obsession and the rejection the two characters faced led to their demise. Gatsby was obsessed with Daisy, and he decided to make money to fit in the old money society and get Daisy. However, after becoming rich, Daisy rejected him, and this led to his destruction. In fact, before his death, Gatsby takes the blame of running over Myrtle, which was Daisy’s mistake and she does nothing about it. Daisy only cared about herself, and she never did anything to save Gatsby when he was about to die for her mistake because all she cared about was her reputation. Therefore, Gatsby is destroyed by the world he lives in because his obsession for Daisy led to his death after taking the blame for her mistakes.
On the other hand, Blanche was a character that was obsessed with her lies when portraying herself as an innocent young woman. Blanche is a character who was helpless and needed care and protection from the society she lived and got none. Therefore, Blanche used her lies to have a relationship with Mitch because she desired to have a good life different from her past one. Nevertheless, she could not accomplish it because she was caught up in her lies and her life crumbles leading to her destruction. Her delusions destroyed her because she lived in a world of lies
In essence, Tennessee Williams and Scot Fitzgerald presents two fascinating characters who are destroyed by the society they live in. Blanche Dubois and Jay Gatsby in A Street Car Named Desire and The Great Gatsby are characters who are externally different but share internal attributes that are important in understanding the plot and themes of the two novels. The two characters both had shadowy backgrounds, but they try to hide them to fulfill their desires, but they are destroyed by the worlds they live in. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, the protagonist quests for love and acceptance into a money society, but is rejected which leads to his demise. At the end of the story, Gatsby dies because of his obsession for Daisy because he took blame for a mistake she had committed.
Comparably, in A Street Car Named Desire, Blanche desired to live a happy and clean life. All she wanted was a sense of belonging and compassion from the society, but all she got was rejection and lack of attention from her only sister. As a result, Blanche lied about everything in her life just to have a relationship. In the end, her lies caught up with her, and she could not have the life she desired. Even though Gatsby and Blanche had dreams and desires in their lives, they could not achieve them because the society did not allow them thus leading to their tragic end. Blanche and Gatsby lived in their delusions in a world that sinned against them than they sinned against it thus destroying them.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner's, 2004. Print.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York, NY: Signet, 1986. Print.
Williams Tennessee. “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The Norton Anthology American Literature: Volume D. Ed. Mary Loeffelholz. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 2186-2248. Print.
