How Does Loneliness Affect Alice In Wonderland

The Solitude Among Beings: Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland & Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby In Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, a small girl named Alice falls asleep, has a strange dream where she finds herself wandering after a rabbit and falls into a hole which leads to a foreign world called Wonderland, she seeks a way out of there and encounters peculiar creatures but yet she feels very isolated and distant. Whilst in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a man named Jay Gatsby lives in an enormous mansion by himself and the narrator, Nick Caraway, portrays him and others as lonely. Throughout the novel, Jay Gatsby attempts to win over the love of Daisy Buchanan but in the end, ends up all alone, just as he started. The isolation that Alice and Jay Gatsby feel throughout the novels show that even accompanied by others shows a hard truth: isolation can affect anyone, anywhere. Throughout both stories, characters experience internal conflict, one of which is loneliness. Foster says that the “afflicted character can have any number of problems for which heart disease provides a suitable emblem: bad love, loneliness, cruelty, pederasty, disloyalty, cowardice, lack of determination. Socially, it may stand for these matters on a larger scale, or for something seriously amiss at the heart of things” (Foster 29).

Loneliness can accompany anyone; it even finds it’s way to the narrator from The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway. Nick says “‘I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others’” (Fitzgerald 56). He feels an emotion and relates to other humans with that feeling. He can feel the loneliness in others, he is aware of it. When Nick is driving with Jay Gatsby, Gatsby says to Nick “I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me’” (Fitzgerald 67). Gatsby remains in solitude due to the “sad thing that happened to” him. Many characters experience this feeling and it is