Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

One of the most prominent novels of the 1900s, "The Great Gatsby" is a staple in classic literature. Often mistakenly praised as a love story, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "The Great Gatsby" as a satire for American ideals in the 1920s. He criticized social class, America's care-free society, and the idea of the American dream. In the novel, Fitzgerald uses the narrator, Nick Carraway, as a window into the lives of the wealthy people of East and West egg. The most prominent person from West Egg is…

Each character of any class will all end in death. Atwood is making a statement as to the often idealized, but misguided pursuits of the bourgeois middle class. Margret wrote. “Don’t be deluded by any other endings, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not downright sentimentality. The only authentic ending is the one provided here:…

Within Mary Shelley’s renowned novel, Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein, a representation of the madness that evolves around the desire to succeed in doing the impossible, is mangled by the hardships that come with completing the unimaginable task of creating a chimera. Although written in 1818, Shelley’s message of enjoying the pursuit over the ending product is still relevant today. Society continues to falsely idolizes those for their achievements…

The process of putting two disparate philosophers in dialogue with each other, in an attempt to reconcile their views, is an old philosophical tradition. Early Christians grappled with making platonic theory and catholic doctrine compatible. The great scholars of Bagdad worked to let Aristotle and the Quran stand side by side. While it may seem like such attempts are simply efforts to “have cake and eat it too”, there is much to be learned from evaluating a text in light of what may at first…

stories narrate a unique tale while examining a topic that has fascinated all of humanity throughout time: death. In the “Tenth of December,” Don Eber, a protagonist of the story, faces death in two forms: his stepfather’s passing and his personal pursuit of death. Likewise, Mink’s daughter and Wolfred in “The Flower” confront death with the parting of Mink and Mackinnon. Coupled together, the two narratives examine the concept of mortality, in addition to revealing its long-term consequences on…

deranged world that we live in today aims for happiness. We are simply slaves to our primal passions, shackled in our endless pursuit of fulfillments and shaping our existence around them. Gravitating towards the concepts in life that bring us pleasure, and recoiling away from those that could cause us pain. Several think of happiness as an overall end goal, while others consider happiness the starting point of being great. Nevertheless, happiness is drawn from different matters based off the…

This paper will prove that love is continually sought among humans. Love, a term lightly used in the common world today is not simply a descriptive word to use for something we like. There is a deeper meaning and a more direct use of the word, and the idea. Nothing is more important than love, and no subject than it is so often misused. In its deeper sense love is often looked upon as a Christian or moral viewpoint and not something that can or should be applied outside of that to the common…

Deep and long-lasting, loved-filled, true friendships can save more lives than any other relationship. This is where my story begins as it was the love of a friend that got me through the impossible and gave new meaning to the saying turning lambs into lions. The most frustrating thing about chronic illness is the loss of self that accompanies it. The diagnosis, or initial lack of it in my case, has a cruel way of turning your life upside down and backwards. Everything you knew about yourself…

Symposium and Sappho, Selected Poems discuss the topic of love as experienced by a select few of society- and thus reject the notion that love is a universal human experience. Through this essay, love will be examined as it pertains to each text and then these ideas will be observed to understand how they reject the notion that love is a universal human experience. Set in ancient Greece, Plato’s work titled Symposium presents his view that love can only be experienced by men and boys -through…

that accompanies these emotions. This ultimately results in chaos and creates the dynamics of desire in the play. We can see how the involvement of strong human emotions such as hate and love can alter the course of events, such as the pursuit of knowledge and the progression of intellect. The inhibition of the pursuit of knowledge is shown in the passage where Thomasina is expressing her disdain for Cleopatra and by saying that Cleopatra was a poor leader due to her allowance of emotion to…