Comparing The Great Gatsby 'And' Sonnet XLIII

Literary works that have memorable impacts all share one thing in common: their authors carefully and superbly fabricate the details of the work. This careful and superb detailing is evident in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as well as in Pablo Neruda’s poem “Sonnet XLIII”. The authors of both literary works bring great detail into their prose or poem that makes their work both impactful and memorable. While both The Great Gatsby and “Sonnet XLIII” are full of significant details, the way of going about creating such detail contrasts between the literary works. Both works detail the motivation of the character or speaker and they both use imagery to do so, but the way we get this information stand apart.
“Sonnet XLIII” and The Great Gatsby share similar qualities in detail. These memorable qualities are the detailing of motivation, imagery, and the detailing of a cliché. In Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet XLIII”, Neruda is describing his absorption in his lover Matilde by explaining that he sees her in everyone and everything. The poet shows that his lover Matilde is the motivation that drives him, “I search for you in the faces of others,/ in this rough winding river of

Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is motivated by his envisioned love for his dream girl Daisy. In order to show this motivation, Fitzgerald symbolized this motivation with a green light at the end of Daisy’s dock which Gatsby could see from his property, “If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay … You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock,” (Fitzgerald 92). The entire reason for Gatsby becoming rich illicitly and moving across the bay from Daisy was because he is madly in love with her or at least the idea of her. Gatsby’s absorption with Daisy is the cause for him to have changed who he is. Later in the book Gatsby is exposed to the fact that Daisy is not who she once was and that he cannot repeat the