Are Four Works That Embody Everything Great About Literature

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Billy Budd by Herman Melville, and Bartleby the Scrivener, also by Melville, are four works that embody everything great about literature. They relate to the people who read them by tackling issues common to the human struggle. All four novels deal in Man vs. Man conflict. Each has protagonists who have to make choices which, in the end, either directly or indirectly leads to the antagonist's decline. However, each novel also deals with a loss of control, which is ultimately the death of the antagonist.

The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is a portrait of American society during the Roaring Twenties. The story is centered on young and flashy Jay Gatsby, the story's protagonist, who is having an affair with socialite Daisy Buchanan. Nick, Daisy's cousin, is a well born young man who has moved to the east in order to obtain wealth for himself. Nick befriends Gatsby and soon finds himself having to choose between his morality and his career in deciding what to do.

Gatsby's naivety begins the downward spiral of his life. Nick is able to admire Gatsby despite his knowledge of his illegal dealings and bootlegging. Ironically, it is the corrupt Daisy who takes pause at Gatsby's distasteful past. Her indignation at his "dishonesty," however, is based more on class roles and not what she believes to be morally correct. Nick realizes that Gatsby is attempting to recreate his past and tries to tell Gatsby that it won't work. However, Gatsby doesn't want to believe this concept. "Can't repeat the past…Why of course you can" (Fitzgerald 110)

As with the antagonists in the all four of the novels, it was in the end Gatsby's lack of control that knocked him down to his demise.

His heart beat faster and fast as Daisy's white face came up to this own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been stuck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (Fitzgerald 110)

Gatsby loses control of his life the moment he decides to let his love for Daisy take over his being. From this point on, his rationale has gone out the window and his only goal is to get Daisy to belong to him. Gatsby's ignorance causes him to die because he doesn't have the tools required to survive.

A Separate Peace is a classic Bildungsroman tale that takes place at a boarding school for boys called Devin. The protagonist of this tale, Gene Forrester, is a boy of 16 who desires desperately to gain the social status and popularity of his best friend, and antagonist, Phineas. Phineas is loved by all who knows him for his easy going personality, athleticism and his bravery. However, Finny's career as an athlete comes to a devastating end when a jealous Gene pushes him off a tree.

In A Separate Peace, the students of Devon are fighting a war very similar to the one being fought in the world outside of Devon. Gene tries to deny that he has hurt Finny. He cannot bring himself to face the part of him that is guilty. Gene has developed a paranoid way of thought. Finny is a team player however everything he does appears to Gene to be a direct threat to him. Gene was perfectly fine calling Finny his "best friend" but didn't trust him enough to actually treat him as such.

Gene soon loses control of his emotions and his thoughts. He goes from recognizing that there is no one he can trust to deciding that Finny and him were "even in enmity" (Knowles 53). It is these revelations that cause Gene to lose complete control over his actions, if only for a second, and push Finny out of the tree. Finny eventually dies because he is incapable of making the giant leap into the adult world and therefore can't exist in it.

Billy Budd is known as one of the greatest works of the 19th century.