Comparison Of Macbeth And The Man Who Planted Trees

A satisfying life can be achieved and interpreted differently by many people. For some people, it includes great fortune and social status, but for others it may simply be feeling content with your actions. Various ideas of a satisfying life can be found in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Jean Giono’s “The Man Who Planted Trees”.
In Macbeth, Shakespeare creates a tragic environment with the story of an ambitious thane in Scotland who is prophesied to become king and won’t let anything prevent that future. After the death of his wife, Macbeth expresses his idea of life by saying,
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And

(V.v.18)
Macbeth suggests that life is nothing but an illusion where humans continuously strive for importance and eventually become seized by death with a result of being rarely remembered. This dissatisfaction reveals Macbeth’s feelings towards a desired life. Macbeth would prefer a life that is remembered throughout generations and doesn’t feel like a race towards death.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby tells the story of an ambitious young man named Jay Gatsby who creates his ideal life with extreme wealth and high social status to court a woman he hasn’t seen in five years. As the story follows the narration of Nick Carraway, Nick describes Gatsby’s path to his future identity by saying,
His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God . . . and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.