A Focus on Façades, not Happiness

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the author focuses on the vast difference between happiness and the facades people create to feel better about their dissatisfaction with their lives. When Myrtle claims that she does not love her husband, her sister, Catherine, reminds Myrtle, “‘you were crazy about him’” (35). Catherine’s observation about Myrtle’s earlier happiness in her marriage highlights Myrtle’s opportunity for a content, but poor, life. However, Myrtle chooses Tom, a selfish and rich man, over her kind and poor husband because society focused on wealth and status during the 1920s. While Tom and Myrtle pretend to have a wonderful relationship and allegedly love each other more than their spouses, their supposed strong bond proves weak under stress. As a result of Myrtle’s desperation to follow others and embrace the attitudes of the time, she finds herself in an abusive, shallow relationship. Characters like Myrtle try to mask their unfulfilled lives with glamorous appearances but they fail to realize that no amount of spending or partying will make them truly feel better about themselves. So far, most of the characters pursue what they feel should make them happy simply because others do the same. While the characters tend to annoy and frustrate me, I overall feel pity for them, especially the women. The female characters believe they only have marriage and status to help them improve their lives so they never try to achieve anything meaningful. At one point, Tom’s wife, Daisy, even states how she hopes her daughter becomes a ‘“little fool”’ (17). I find her view particularly depressing because I know she will pass on her negative opinions of the world and the role of women to her daughter. I view the lack of true happiness in the story especially disappointing because of the recent Thanksgiving. None of my relatives live in Ohio so holidays allow me to visit with family and the latest Thanksgiving let me see my grandparents and my sisters who live away at college. Thanksgiving always reminds me of the importance of family and friends and appreciating the people in my life, rather than the possessions. Unfortunately, Tom and Myrtle fail to understand the value of meaningful relationships with others and I could not help but compare the gathering of family members at my home to the odd grouping of characters in the New York apartment in the novel. While my family spent the day in the kitchen cooking and enjoying each other’s company, the characters only enjoy each other’s presence when they can tear them down or hear new, malicious gossip. Perhaps most striking, my evening ended with pumpkin pie and theirs with a man breaking his mistress’s nose in a moment of rage. The Great Gatsby thus far emphasizes the desperate side of human nature, when people think they need to constantly become better to fit society’s standards even when doing so threatens their own happiness.

The Patient Wait

The Patient Wait

On July 2, 1997, I became a big sister. Unfortunately, no one ever fully explained to me the possibility of a baby brother.  In a family of three girls, my sisters and I naturally assumed we would only ever have sisters, so our brother came as quite the surprise. My sisters soon overcame their initial shock, but I remained stubbornly convinced that, logically, my brother would become a girl.  After years of taking care of my cherished baby dolls, barbies, polly pockets, and various other dolls, I knew that not only could I handle a baby sister, but I deserved one. Over the next few years, I patiently waited for my brother to magically transform into a girl. While awaiting this change, I took matters into my own hands. I always fervently wished for a sister to dress up, so I used all the plastic necklaces and glittery bracelets at my disposal to dress up my toddler brother, usually with a bribe of candy for him. In the evening, with everyone home, I paraded him around the living room, proud of my handiwork. Although as a child I never questioned my actions, while recently thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I thought of my childhood desire for a baby sister. Confused, I wondered why I now remembered that family story that had gone unmentioned for several years. However, the more I analyzed my fixation on a sister, the more I compared myself with the story’s irrational narrator who focuses so intently on an old man’s evil eye that he allows his obsession to control him until he loses his grasp on reality and becomes mad. Fortunately, I never committed murder nor would I say I developed an obsession with the idea of a younger sister, but I allowed my desire for one to prevent me from accepting reality. For a few years, I remained blissfully in denial, awaiting the day when my sister would arrive. At around age five, I finally accepted what my parents always insisted upon— my brother would remain a boy and I would never have a younger sister. Luckily for my family, instead of going mad, like the narrator, when I realized the error of my ways, I embraced my younger brother and the importance of my role as a big sister to him. I never needed a sister to dress; I just wanted to act as the older sibling and I never opened myself up to the possibility that I could hold such a role with either a sister or brother. Perhaps we all have something in our life that consumes us for a time and controls our actions. For the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” it manifests itself in an eye, for me, in my wish for a younger sister.

The Shouts that Go Unheard

In Roald Dahl’s short story, “The Sound Machine,” he examines the importance of life and understanding one’s impact on the world. In the beginning of the story, Dahl portrays Klausner as a timid, curious man who dreams of uncovering a new world of sound. When Klausner first hears plants crying out when they become injured, he becomes excited and amazed by his discovery. However, Dahl soon illustrates that with knowledge comes the responsibility to act on that information. Klausner allows such responsibility to overwhelm him, as he cannot deal with the harmful consequences of his most basic actions, like pulling a flower from the ground. In order to share his new burden, Klausner begs a doctor he knows to come over so he can hear the screaming as well because ‘“it’s driving me mad!”’(32). Through using exclamatory syntax and directly characterizing Klausner as “mad,” the author indirectly characterizes him as desperate in order to assert that when people feel overwhelmed by their duties, they turn to others to help them. Although doctors often represent responsibility and helpfulness, the doctor tries to remain ignorant and refuses to acknowledge the sounds he hears, illustrating that some people believe in the idea that “ignorance is bliss.” However, Klausner forces the doctor to try to alleviate the tree’s pain, illustrating that no one can ever truly isolate themselves from others’ suffering and everyone must play a role in ending it. Fortunately, in real life, people do not have to constantly hear blades of grass scream when they walk across a lawn or roses cry out in pain when they create a bouquet. Constant, forced awareness of so much pain could only drive people crazy like it does with Klausner, because people can only help so much before they must accept their limits. Klausner’s fixation on the going beyond such limits causes him to become increasingly illogical and by the end of the story, he desperately begs the doctor to stitch up wood. His desperation illustrates that while people should try to help others, becoming obsessed with past harms, to a point where it unproductively consumes one’s life, can only cause more troubles. Dahl’s juxtaposition of two extreme views, Klausner’s obsession with helping and the doctor’s denial of the pain, demonstrates the importance of finding a middle ground where people focus on helping others in the present, but most importantly, use knowledge of the past and present to prevent tragedies form reoccurring. The story highlights the need for increased awareness for all living beings’ pain. Like the plants’ agony in the story, people’s pain in the world usually remains unapparent. For me, the story’s deeper meaning deals with preventing people from unnecessarily suffering. The story’s focus on the cruelty of one living being’s pain emphasizes the horrific nature of thousands or even millions of living beings facing torture or death, as in the case of wars and genocides. Klausner imagines, horrified, the sounds that entire wheat fields would make when cut.  In the short story, Klausner uncovers a suffering he never knew he could inflict- the torture he causes when he harms plants. Klausner asks how people can ‘“know…a rosebush doesn’t feel pain?”’ (31). Through his use of a rhetorical question, the writer creates internal conflict in Klausner as he desperately tries to understand his impact on living beings. Furthermore, Klausner’s internal conflict allows him to serves as a synecdoche for people who question their role in life. The pain that even the smallest flower feels in the story demonstrates the importance of valuing all life, for we can never truly understand how significant a role we may play in others’ lives. The story, particularly its theme of sound and nature, reminds me of a question I have often heard: if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it still make a sound? After reading “The Sound Machine,” I realize that events, like a tree falling, carry the same impact regardless of whether or not we observe them. Poverty, war, hunger, genocide, fatal diseases, terrorism - every day, people around the world suffer. Although we do not hear screams and shouts from every distressed person, like Klausner hears plants’ cries of pain, a cry for help, whether figurative or literal, should never go unheard. Regardless of whether one witnesses suffering, the pain remains just as real, as well as the need for people to take an active role in lessening it.