Well, it’s just like I expected: we
have another House of Mirth on our
hands here! Once again, leave it to mankind to prove how horrendously wicked
and evil it can be and how its tendency to make false judgments of other people
can lead to utter destruction. The similarities between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth are incredible: the
main character pursues love and success, drives himself or herself into trouble
due to his or her own character flaws, becomes the victim of atrocious rumors
or misunderstandings due to another character’s wickedness, and ultimately dies
unsuccessful and essentially alone. If these are the only kinds of novels we’re
going to read all year long, I’m a little depressed! (Just kidding, I have
actually enjoyed both books- but can these characters do us all a favor and try
a little harder for a happy ending?)
The fact that Gatsby is murdered in his own backyard and not a single person
seems to care besides Nick saddens me so much, and the fact that Daisy does not
even know of his death yet because she skipped off to who-knows-where with Tom
without so much as a phone call to Gatsby infuriates me so much that I can
hardly write about it. Some people’s actions aggravated me to such an extreme,
such as when Mr. Wolfsheim wrote Nick saying, “I cannot come down now as I am
tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in this thing
now” (Fitzgerald, 166), that I practically want to give up on every single
character in this book except for Nick Carraway.
As I read of the tragic and
shocking events which rapidly unfolded in this brief section of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I was
able to draw some extremely strong parallels between this piece of the novel
and the season 6 finale of one of my favorite TV shows, Grey’s Anatomy, which allowed me to observe some timeless tendencies
of human nature. In the particular season finale of Grey’s Anatomy which I am speaking of, a man named Gary Clark
brings his severely ill wife into the hospital for a required surgery.
Unfortunately, as the doctors suspected, the surgery was unable to save Mr.
Clark’s wife, and the effects of her surgery left her completely and
irreparably brain dead. Despite the doctors’ many attempts to compassionately explain
to Mr. Clark that his wife needed to be taken off the machines keeping her
breathing, for otherwise she would spend the rest of her life in a vegetative
state, Mr. Clark’s overwhelming grief prevented him from comprehending the fact
that his wife was already essentially dead. Although the hospital was
eventually required by law to turn off her machines, Gary Clark believed in his
grief-stricken mind that Derek Shepherd, the chief of surgery, was solely
responsible for his wife’s death. Consequently, he returned to the hospital with
a shotgun about a week after his wife’s machines were turned off and commenced
to shoot at random in his hunt for Doctor Shepherd. After Mr. Clark shot
Shepherd, he turned the instrument by which he killed a number of innocent
people on himself and took his own life. This storyline is startlingly similar
to the tragic events which unfurl in this section of Great Gatsby, as Mr. Wilson’s immense sadness and loneliness blurs
his thoughts so profoundly that, in his delusional mind, he decides without a
shadow of a doubt that Gatsby had an affair with Myrtle and intentionally
murdered her. Before anyone was able to convince Mr. Wilson otherwise, Mr.
Wilson hunted Gatsby down and shot him, immediately afterward taking his own
life as well. As I read of Gatsby’s murder and Mr. Wilson’s suicide, I could
not help but think of the horrific scenes I watched in the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, and a timeless truth
about human nature dawned on me: grief is one of the most painful and powerful
emotions that a human is capable of experiencing. Although these two plotlines
took place in very different time periods and under relatively contrasting
circumstances, the tendency of mankind to be driven insane by grief is evident;
regardless of the time, place, or people involved, grief has always remained
one of the most notorious and wicked forces driving the deranged actions of
distraught and desperately miserable individuals. Unfortunately, in both cases,
this atrocious grief led to the imperilment of two men who were essentially
innocent (well, Gatsby did kill
Myrtle, but he never had an affair with her or murdered her intentionally). As
a result, one of the most powerful lessons that I will draw from The Great Gatsby is the wretched effects
that desperation, loneliness, and grief can inflict on a person, and I believe that
this was one of the major themes which Fitzgerald hoped to convey.
This was the best clip I was able to find from the season 6 finale of Grey's Anatomy
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