When done just right, reading about a character’s pursuit of love is a favorite ingredient in some of the most beloved tales. Generally, we enjoy seeing passionate characters going after something they want. It can really get us going when what they want is seemingly unattainable. Characters in love certainly can go to extremes in their pursuits for the desired companion. We enjoy seeing how far they will go and whether or not they win the love they seek. In the end, are we satisfied if the love is ultimately unrequited? Or must we get our happy ending and see the lovesick character get what he wants?
In The Great Gatsby, the title character, Jay Gatsby, is in love with the elegant and married Daisy Buchanan and has been for a long time. As the jazz standard would say, Gatsby’s “got it bad and that ain’t good.” He is so head over heels in love with Daisy that he has built his entire life around doing what he thinks it will take to win her over: busting into the upper class by making loads of cash. The idea is not so outlandish, it being the 1920s when folks seemed pretty comfortable with choosing friends and lovers based on the size of their bank accounts. Poor Gatsby, coming from a penniless, uneducated background, definitely had his work cut out for him. It does not really seem to matter how Gatsby managed to make all that money and buy that mansion. (He does manage to hide it pretty well.) The fact is he did it. And it worked. With a little nudge and help from Nick, Gatsby gets the girl – sort of. Of course, in the end though, he ultimately loses. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s experience watching the American Dream dissolve into The Great Depression, Gatsby and Daisy’s affair is a fleeting moment that ends darkly.
Pip, of Great Expectations, has no easy task in setting his sights on Estella. The girl is way out of his league. The Victorian class system was even more rigid than America in the 1920s and poor Pip, the broke-as-a-joke orphan, seems to be fighting a losing battle. We stick with Pip and cheer him on as he tries and tries to reinvent himself. Pip gets lucky with some unexpected cash and is able to pursue becoming a “gentleman.” The ending, as we know it, shows Pip and Estella finally ending up together. It is not a wedding or a pregnancy like a romantic blockbuster movie, but we are left feeling hopeful. The original ending that Charles Dickens wrote did not end so happily. Pip and Estella do not end up together and actually never see each other again. The ending we all know, where Pip and Estella end up together, is certainly more satisfying and less depressing. Is there something we see in Pip’s love for Estella that we don’t see in Gatsby’s for Daisy? Why are we okay with Gatsby losing everything in the end? Is it more fulfilling to see him dead than to see him ultimately live without Daisy? Is a satisfying love story really more about our main character and his pursuit and less about the actual ending?
tfwire 