Comparison of the Presentation of the Characters Jay...

Comparison of the Presentation of the Characters Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver from The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald is known as a writer who chronicled his times. This work has been critically acclaimed for portraying the sentiments of the American people during the 1920s and 1930s. ‘The Great Gatsby’ was written in 1924, whilst the Fitzgeralds were staying on the French Riviera, and ‘Tender is the Night’ was written nearly ten years later, is set on, among other places, the Riviera. There are very interesting aspects of these works, such as the way Fitzgerald treats his so-called heroes, and to what extent we can call them heroic. Gatsby and Diver are both presented as wealthy men leading privileged lives. ‘The Great†¦show more content†¦Instead, Dick felt ‘a discrepancy between the growing luxury in which the Divers lived, and the need for display which apparently went along with it. Dick feels trapped by Nicole’s money, and constantly tires to assert his independence from it, such as when he and Nicole started out togethe r, he supported them on his few thousand a year. However, the Warren family undermined his independence, such as buying the Divers their clinic in Zurich, in order to protect Nicole. Nicole wants to own Dick, and once of the ways in which to do so is by her money (’Nicole, wanting to own him †¦ encouraged any slackness on his part’). People see the Divers for their money, such as Franz Gregorovious with his plans for the clinic. It is not that Dick is adverse to the concept of money and wealth, but he feels that he has become trapped by Nicole’s riches (he ‘had wedded a desire for money to an essentially unacquisitive nature †¦ he had never felt more sure of himself †¦ than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. Yet he has been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety deposit vaults.’) Despite both these men having vast amounts of money at their disposal, thus the theoretical a bility to do or achieve anything