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.