How Are Gatsby And Holden Caulfield Alike

In The Catcher and the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden Caulfield would like The Great Gatsby because he has much in common with Gatsby. After all, they are both fixated on the past. Holden is stuck in the past with his brother Allie’s death. Allie was only eleven when he died of leukemia. The tragedy of his younger brother’s death left him lost in the way he looked at life and a lack of connection with other people. He always brings up Allie in such a beautiful way and never has anything bad to say about him. He says how “[Allie] was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody.God, he was a nice kid, though he used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair.” (Salinger

In addition to both Holden and Gatsby’s fixation on their past, they both look at the world in a very pessimistic way. Holden is like this because he is unable to see the good in life and always views everything as depressing due to his negative personality. This is shown twice in chapter two when Holden enters Mr. Spencer’s home and the smell of Vicks Nose Drops makes him feel depressed. Another moment in this chapter is also when Holden sees the clothing Mr. Spencer has on and “what made it even more depressing, old Spencer had on this very sad, ratty old bathrobe that he was probably born in or something” (Salinger 10). As Holden walks into the house, many things that come up bring a sense of sadness to him, including the smell of Vicks Nose Drops and what Mr. Spencer had on as Holden walked in. This shows the pessimistic side of Holden’s view of the world in a negative manner. This connects to how Gatsby also has this pessimistic view of his world where even though he has all this wealth he is still sad every day because he has no one to share it