Similarities Between The Great Gatsby And Aodus

Both The Great Gatsby and Exodus feature themes and characters that define what it means to be good person in their respective literary context. Moses in Exodus is built, character-wise, on traditional traits that would make someone a good person: obedience, leadership, strength, and compassion. However, in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald constructs a narrative around modernist 1920’s society, whose moral decay gives a strong example as to what it would mean to not be a good person. Throughout The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is revealed to be obsessive, selfish, and arrogant. Moses and Gatsby can be seen as moral antitheses of each other, with Moses’s characteristics directly defines a morally good person; Gatsby as a character constructs a similar definition, only through counterexample. Moses is one of the quintessential

Through both the Old and New Testaments, the strongest characters with the most compelling narratives feature, such as Moses, an archetypal redemption storyline throughout their development. These redemption arcs throughout the bible demonstrate how, in order to become a good person, one does not need to be without flaw or sin. Instead, being a good person is being able to overcome and repent from one’s actions and adopt a moral lifestyle. In Exodus, Moses “[kills] and Egyptian and [hides] him in the sand”, and upon discovering that his actions were not secret, “Moses fled from [Egypt] and went to live in Midian” (Exodus 2:12, 15). Despite being an outcast from his homeland as well as a criminal, God chooses Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses himself doubts this decision, and he says “’who am I, that I should go and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?””