Comparing The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby.

In addition to each character’s interactions in relationships, great contrast between both Nick and Jake is exhibited in their attitudes toward and engagements in alcoholic consumption. In the microcosm that Jake and his acquaintances live in, drinking is the prevailing destructive and escapist activity. Jake’s dinner with Brett at the novel’s end exhibits this as Jake orders and consumes three bottles of wine by himself and then proceeds to order two more; when Brett asks Jake not to get drunk he replies “How do you know?” (250) Jake drinks to alleviate the pain caused by his impotence and subsequent inability to consummate his relationship with Brett. Drinking compounds Jake’s dire sentiment, but unlike him, Carraway experiences disillusion through drinking vicariously in the acts his acquaintances. Admitting that he has “been drunk just twice in my [his] life” (33), Nick’s experiences with alcohol are less visceral but still important. When carousing with Tom, his mistress (Myrtle) and their friends, Nick speaks of “the bottle of whiskey – a second one–”  as being  “in constant demand by all present…” (39). It is not shortly after, that in rage, Tom breaks his mistress’s nose. Though Nick immerses himself in destructive happenings like Jake, he is still quite a unique individual in contrast as those events are not a consequence of his disillusionment as is often the case with Jake. Because The Great Gatsby is written as a first person narrative, Fitzgerald’s decision to make Nick a temperate drinker accentuates the destructive force of drinking in others such as Tom, Daisy and Myrtle. Ironically, Jake’s excessive drinking in The Sun Also Rises, which is also written as a first person narrative, makes this same outlook apparent in both Jake and his friends. Though the same idea is presented, it is made by two main characters whose attitudes toward alcohol are in direct disparity to each other.

Moreover from differing behavior with alcohol, Nick and Jake vary in susceptibility to female influence, which cements their disparity. Nick, unlike the majority of male characters in both works, lets women put little influence on his happiness. His relationship with Jordan Baker is of little emotional investment and the two serve more so as a foil for each other than a match. Nick prides himself on his “fundamental decencies” (6), yet sees Jordan as “incurably dishonest”(63). The difference allows Carraway to deal with her shrewdly later as with their phone conversation on the day of Gatsby’s death, “…abruptly we weren’t talking any longer. I don’t know which one of us hung up with a sharp click but I know I didn’t care.” (163) Nick is more so preoccupied with Gatsby’s lady troubles than his own. Jake however, is not free from stigma when dealing with Brett. Jake’s inability to have sex with Brett makes him feel inadequate and unlike Nick’s dealings with his love interest, Brett influences Jake’s relationships with other men in the book, especially Cohn. Most notable however, is that the strength of Brett’s influence on Jake is so strong, that it causes him to betray his aficion for bullfighting when he submits the young, untainted Romero to the whims of a licentious Brett. In reference to Brett’s desire to sleep with Pedro Romero, Jake urges and pleads, “Don’t do it…You don’t have to do that ” (187), yet acquiesces and agrees to set the two up. Though Jake acknowledges the hell that is his relation ship with Brett, he can’t escape it. “Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship…I had been having Brett as a friend….I had been getting something for nothihng. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came.”(152) Jakes relationship with Brett is nothing but perpetual torture because though he provides the emotional support she seeks, he can not meet her desire for a physical element in their relationship and therefore must suffer as she finds it in various other men. Where as Nick finds pain in the destruction of Gatsby by a woman, Jake finds pain in his personal ruin by a woman.

Both The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises address the post war frustration experienced by those of the Lost Generation, but do so through developing two very different main characters. Though the afore mentioned works do share similar themes and concepts, those ideas are delivered through very different styles and points of view that have resulted in two very different main characters. In contrasting Nick Carraway and Jake Barnes’ stock in relationships, sentiments toward alcohol, and affects from women, a clear distinction between the behaviors of each character is made.