Similarities Between The Great Gatsby And Fahrenheit 451

During the course of the semester, I covered many topics during this class. These topics consist of; The Great Gatsby, The topic of Rationalism, Romanticism/transcendentalism, The crucible, and Fahrenheit 451. In this assignment, I was asked to summarise each topic with a single thing I could use to describe the meaning of the topic. I chose to summarise each topic in terms of a single quote. I chose quotes because of the open-mindedness of quotes. Everyone sees quotes differently, and they have different meanings for everyone. They are often used to express opinions, or public knowledge led to educate and inspire others.

The Great Gatsby: "They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think

it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now." (-Edna St. Vincent Millay). Jay Gatsby was in search of Daisy Buchanan and her love as long as he met her. He built his entire life around the fact that he wanted to catch her attention and someday run away with her, so that they could build a life together. Unfortunately, it seemed like Daisy didn’t miss Jay as much as he missed her.

Rationalism: “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” (-Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). A simple concept, a basic item, a brick for instance, can be used for many things, but it can’t make things itself. It requires people to make that brick matter, it needs to be made into something by someone. If nobody will, than you mind as well throw that brick out of the window. The topic of Rationalism is about people stepping up and doing what needs to be done. It is a compelling argument that if we didn’t have Rationalists, that we would not be looking at the same technological, industrially advanced world that is today.

Romanticism/Transcendentalism: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” (-Ralph Waldo Emerson) Amongst civilization, there are certain people that feel pressured into what everyone else is doing, or what is the ‘norm’ or ‘socially acceptable’, and these people also don’t want to get with these social standards.

They want to live their own lives and find themselves away from what they believe is the social tyranny of cities, and society altogether. To add to that, they also believe they can find themselves among nature and find what they were meant to do with their life. These people are called Transcendentalists.

The Crucible: “They had set forth to rid their town of evil and had managed to rid it of pleasure as well.” (-Angel Cox, A Day in the Dark) The rumors of witches among the town forced a investigation into witches. People began to abuse that power, and falsely accusing people of witchcraft, and got people killed because of whatever it was they did to them. There was no way to actually prove that they were not involved in witchcraft, so it was one person's word against the others. They set to rid the town of witchcraft, but the entire town was scared for their lives as an end

result.

Fahrenheit 451: “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” When the government set to rid the people of books, they didn’t have much difficulty doing so, because the people at the time didn’t want to read books anyways. The people made a conscious decision to be ignorant, and the government took advantage of that by attempting to forever keep the people of society ignorant. Montag wants to study books and save culture, and keep it through the books that he will read and the books he will probably write in the future.