Comparing the Past in The Ice Palace and The Great Gatsby :: comparison compare contrast essays

The Nature of the Past in The deoxyephedrine castle and The Great Gatsby In The Ice Palace and The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the nature of the done for(p). He shows us that we can neither return to nor equivocation from the past. In The Ice Palace he writes about the pasts of two different societies, the North and the South. In The Great Gatsby he writes about Daisys relationships with two men, Tom and Gatsby. In twain of these stories some characters want to escape from the past and others want to return to the past(Pendelton, 37). These characters find that neither of these is possible, that the past and the present have become intertwined. The eldest society Fitzgerald deals with in The Ice Palace is the North. Here people leaven to ignore the past. We expose this when Harry Bellamy tells us that Everybody has a father, and about fractional of us have grandfathers. Back of that we dont go(Fitzgerald, The Diamond as bouffant as the Ritz and Other Storie s, 72). They have no interest in what has gone before. Even their buildings are new. An example of this is the library of the Bellamy house. Many of the books havent been read and the items in it all looked about fifteen years old(71). The epitome of northerly buildings is the ice palace, which stands for a winter and then melts away. It is an attempt at a building without a past, create fresh each time. In the grey graveyard, when Sally Carrol is talking about Margery Lee, Harry Bellamy looks at the grave and says Theres postcode here(68). To him headstones have no reality beyond the immediate visible one. In the North the snow hides the gravestones, making each a get out shadow against light shadows(80). The hiding of the headstones demonstrates the entire Northern attitude toward the past. They smell out that it isnt important and should be ignored. Despite all of these efforts the North is unable to escape the past. The gravestones may be covered with snow, but they are s till there. at long last the snow will melt and everyone will be able to see them. Even the ice palace, the attempt at a building with no past, falls victim to it. The last time an ice palace was built was in 1885, but it is still peopled by those shades of the eighties(80).