Crystal Castaldi Professor Douglas Brown Fyw 20 April 2018 Two Warring Worlds: An Analysis of Holden Caulfield and Nick Carraway The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a tragedy that, despite it taking place in the 1920s, describes many themes that still apply today. The character of Nick Carraway in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby can be likened to Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Holden, an adolescent teenager, goes through his awful life in constant question of what childhood actually is.; he is constantly searching for a way to keep his innocence. Unfortunately, Holden’s socials skills don’t allow him from being honest with himself, much like Nick’s quality of not being able to understand the idea of romantic love. Throughout Salinger’s timeless …show more content…
However, it is easy for the reader to notice the sentiment behind his words, even if Holden chooses to hide those feelings from himself. Nick resembles Holden when he first describes his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom. He goes into elaborate stiry about why the couple decided to move to East Egg, their individual life stories, and the lack of love/ emotion he sees between them. Immediately following his detailed description of Tom and Daisy, Nick makes apparent that “And so it happened that on a warm windy evening [he] drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom [he] scarcely knew at all” (Fitzgerald 6). By proclaiming that he barely knows two people who he just described in great detail proves Nick’s social awkwardness and lack of desire to be shown as as caring and observant.Nick rather forces himself to act unaffected by his emotional attachments, just like Holden’s incapability to openly show emotion. Both are caught in a cycle of understating how much people and events mean to them; however, they feel admitting that they do in fact care