Narrator's Role in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Kerouac's On The Road

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Narrator's Role in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Kerouac's On The Road

Over the last fifty years, since the release of On The Road in 1957,

it has not been uncommon for critics to draw parallels between

Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel and Fitzgerald’s The Great

Gatsby, released thirty-two years previously. It is for certain that

both the novels share many similar traits, both examine concepts of

American ideals and The American Dream, both are heavily influenced by

the jazz age of the time, but nothing binds the novels closer to one

another than the authors’ use of the first person narrative and that

narrators relationship with their leading character.

It is perhaps the most common reading to see both Jay Gatsby and Dean

Moriarty awarded iconic status by their corresponding narrators. The

connotations concerning the epithet found in the very centre of

Fitzgerald’s title alone can bring an image to the reader’s mind of

one of history’s great leaders, putting Gatsby in league with

characters such as Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, Peter the

Great and Frederick the Great. It would seem obvious from the title

that Gatsby is one beheld with admiration and respect by the narrator.

The relationship between Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty is

often viewed in much the same light. The importance of Dean to Sal is

visible from his very first paragraph, where he states that, “the

coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my

life on the road”. Within a short time period, Sal allows his life to

be turned in a completely different direction by someone who is

basically a stranger. This willingness to uproot and follow somebody

else’s lifestyle pays a great complim...

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... with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available

spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run.

It would be easy to substitute the car in this instance with a woman

to come up with a justifiable description of Dean’s attitude towards

women. Just in the way Sal admires and enthuses about his car-parking

abilities, describing him as, “…the most fantastic parking-lot

attendant in the world…” Sal admirers and enthuses about his sex life.

In 1991, Eagleton published an essay with a Marxist sentiment

declaring that, much like Nick, “Sal is suffering from ideology – a

false consciousness that is imposed on them by the hegemonic social

order”. This adds to the link between the two narrators concerning

their feelings towards their leading characters; in particular the

manner in which they both admire the achievements made by Gatsby or

Dean in their love lives.

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