Examples Of Examined Life In The Great Gatsby

The End of All Things Socrates, supposedly inspired by the god Apollo, once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. Human beings are only guaranteed two endings, childhood and death, although life is riddled with a million little goodbyes in between, coming and leaving like the tide. An examined life is a life fully lived, a life in which we come to fully know, not only ourselves, but the world around us, enabling us to say that final goodbye. To live an examined life is to seek out truth, fully embracing the realities of the world, the depth of one’s character, and the consequences (good and bad) of one’s time on Earth. Fitzgerald demonstrates a perfect tragedy in his corrupted romantic Jay Gatsby, whose inability to accept the

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald, pages 171-172). Gatsby has built his entire world on the unstable foundation of one beautiful, glimmering ‘could have been’, completely ignorant of the effects that his manipulations have on the world around him. Both his delusional tendencies and his inability to let go of Daisy leave him not only stuck in the past, but stuck in a past that did not actually happen, transfixed on his perfect picture of Daisy, unable to see or experience reality, or the people in it for what it is and who they are. He lives and dies on the stage that he has turned his world into - but this cannot be an ending, because how can you end a story that never really existed? As the child of a king and a goddess, Achilles’ whole life was written in the stars before he took his first

To J.R.R. Tolkien, a proper ending is one that you can greet like an old friend, bidding what you know farewell in order to step into the next chapter, whatever that may be. He pours this sentiment into the bittersweet ending of Frodo Baggins. When, against all odds, Frodo finally gets home, he finds both it and him drastically changed since his journey began. He knows himself and his world well enough to understand that he has lived out all that he was meant to live in the place that he once called home; Bag End is no longer where he is meant to be. Frodo is not one to be comforted by a false happily-ever-after. He knows that his great adventure has come to an end, even if that end is not the one that he had hoped for. The home that he had dreamt of returning to is no longer home, his quest is complete, all there is left for him to do is rest. It is due to this acceptance that his story doesn’t simply end: Tolkien is able to give him the gift of goodbye. Frodo’s melancholy farewell to his dearest friend, Sam Gamgee, is both stained with sadness and brimming with hope as he recognizes that while Sam still has “‘to be one and whole, for many