Similarities Between Invisible Man And The Great Gatsby

Society is a broad term to identify a specific group of people in a community, but society has an underlying component: expectations. Society takes different social groups and history, and creates expectations for certain groups of people in order to provide a hierarchy of goals that ultimately result in happiness. “Desirée’s Baby” is a short story about a woman who discovers her child has traces of African American heritage; she then questions her identity and becomes unhappy. In “The Great Gatsby,” the protagonist pines for a woman, and as a result he is left alone and miserable. In “Invisible Man,” a man discovers his identity in relation to society, including the inevitable anguish of society’s expectations. Each text is connected by a common dissatisfaction as a result the protagonist’s

Gatsby is a very wealthy, educated, white man: “‘I am the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years.’” (Fitzgerald, 70). He had every trait to be a successful man in the 1920s, but he wanted to be married. Men were not expected to be married because masculine independence was a prominent social expectation. Gatsby fell in love with a woman, Daisy, but let her go when he went to war. When Gatsby returned home he wanted to regain Daisy’s love and commitment: “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay. Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor” (Fitzgerald, 85). Gatsby’s “purposeless splendor” shows the true ambiguity of his life with the absence of a woman. He fulfilled all of society’s expectations, but he was unable to be happy without Daisy because she makes him come