“Sonnets from the Portuguese” by Elizabeth Barret Browning and “The Great Gatsby” by Scott Fitzgerald both focus heavily on love and all that encompasses it, but that’s not all that they are about there is so much more than that. They are concerned with mortality, not being able to move on from the past, being able to be more than what society limits us to. Both writers use love at times as a focal point for these other concerns that they assess through their literary works, it is through love that these concerns are presented.
Throughout all of history humans have been concerned with their mortality, I mean who in this room wants to die and see what’s next? Who would take the gamble? No one knows what happens after death and the unescapable fact that we do all perish make our mortality all the more terrifying. The two texts have differing ways in which they reveal their standing on mortality, Fitzgerald provides his own personnel perspective on mortality within his context that he has implanted into “The Great
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Upon Gatsby’s death all ties are severed and there is a complete descent into apathy, this is evident in Nick’s attempt to contact Gatsby’s most trusted ‘friend’ Wolfsheim. Upon the line of “Mr Gatsby is dead”, Fitzgerald utilizes the metaphor of a phone line, synonymous with the advancements of the 1920s to depict the insignificance of human life “a long silence… an exclamation… then a quick squawk as the connection was broken” the combination of both sound and visual imagery to demonstrate Gatsby’s trivial death and the finality of such an end, the finality of mortality. Hence, the text captures the superficiality of a life lived as a “colossal illusion”, as unlike Browning’s perspective, Gatsby’s life does not transcend into the afterlife. Fitzgerald’s idea of mortality is that life is finite that the end is just that … the