The Hunger Within Me

We have finally finished our unit on "The Great Gatsby" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". In my opinion, these two were the best stories we have read so far in AP English and they will be stored in my memory for a while. But before we leave this segment, I wanted to write about something that I have pondered about for a while now. Every time I hear "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" the thing that comes into my mind first are Ritz crackers. They have appeared constantly in my mind for the past week that I actually came up with a connection that exemplifies the two stories. At the end of "The Diamond as Big as The Ritz", John says that "everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness." (Fitzgerald 113) This is true in a consistent way, as Kismine found her palace the ideal comfort zone and Gatsby characterized this comfort as his past relationship with Daisy. This idea now comes into play with the Ritz crackers. Usually the idealized way people eat Ritz crackers is to eat it with something, whether its salmon, chocolate or anything that makes it taste like a dream. Now, let’s fast forward to where Kismine and Gatsby step out of that dream and face reality. This is now corresponding to eating Ritz crackers without anything. Eating Ritz without anything does not taste horrible, but that's what Kismine and Gatsby are making it seem like. They are still so focused on the past, or focused on the Ritz with something on it, that they are taking advantage of what they have right now and making it seem like the plain Ritz taste bad. This is the struggle that Fitzgerald is portraying through both books, that it is so hard to forget what is great in the past that you are overlooking what is great in what you have now. These two stories will always stay with me through my life and I will always rely on the message that they spread.

                                                                                                    

The Individual Within Me

After a week, we have finally finished reading The Great Gatsby. I felt bad for what Gatsby had to go through because he really didn't do anything wrong. In my mind, I see him as representing a large part of the population today. In the book, we see Gatsby with a luxurious house with all kinds of features such as a "machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb." Even though all of this might seem nice, it does not bring the true meaning of life that one should really focus on. Throughout the book, we see Gatsby quite lonely during his short life. He throws many parties that make him seem popular but if we look deeper, we can see that he does not really have any true friends that he interacts with besides Nick. His one real priority in life is the love of Daisy and he looks at this with quite a passion but it really tears him apart and eventually leads to his downfall. Now if we look into today's world, many people are craving about the idea of money, which has not changed from the past. Many of these famous pop stars have this money, but they too have a lonely feeling in them at some point. Traveling tirelessly with no true friend interactions really strains them down and puts them into a similar situation like Gatsby. While many people don't realize any of these consequences while they are still at an average standard of living, they take advantage of what they already have. Still,unlike the 1920's, many people realized that money does not bring people happiness but true friendship and family does. Life is not supposed to come at ease and the connections you make while you are at this point will give you what you need to live a happy life. As Thomas Aquinas said, "There is nothing on this Earth more to be prized than true friendship."

                                   

The Change Within Me

This week we started to read The Great Gatsby, which is one of the most popular books in the world selling over 25 million copies. At the start of the book, the narrator talks about two unusual islands that "jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere." These two islands are known as the West Egg and the East Egg. These are very peculiar names for an island but the author does this for a reason. Every egg has a different orientation no matter what. Some are elongated and some are stout. This highlights the fact that no two places are the same. Throughout Nick Carraway's life, he has traveled miles and miles and every place has some significance to him. He has lived in the West and soon went to Yale before going to war. All of these different places have transformed him into the man he is and have changed his mind set to go to the east. This is where he sees the most prominent difference in lifestyles. In the West Egg island, all the families have recently become rich, while the residents of east Egg have been known as the old rich where they have adjusted to this lifestyle a long time ago. Although these differences are clearly highlighted, many overlook the Valley of Ashes. This area is about half way between West Egg and New York.  We can look at this area as a cracked egg because of how it is scrunched about between two more wealthier areas. The people of the Valley of ashes are very poor and basically live in the slums. Taking this idea into perspective, we can really think of every place we are at as an egg.