Compare and contrast Essay

F. Scott Fitzgerald, a well-known writer of Jazz Age, wrote fictitious stories but most of them were based on his real life experiences. His wild and tragic experiences and struggles of life are clearly reflected in his stories. Even the reader understands the sequence of the story and clearly imagines the time period in which it must have occurred. The border between a real life experience and a fictitious story completely vanishes while reading Fitzgerald’s stories. Fitzgerald tried to use experimental techniques in his fiction through his two stories, ‘May Day’ and ‘The Diamond as Big as he Ritz’ and that helped him in his later works as well. ‘May Day’ is one of the best examples of his realistic stories. The story takes place after World War II and has many artistic visual descriptions that make the reader imagine the whole situation and surroundings. In chapter 1 there is description of Gordon when he enquires about Phillip Dean in Biltmore Hotel. The enquirer was dressed in a well-cut, shabby suit. He was small, slender, and darkly handsome; his eyes were framed above with unusually long eyelashes and below with the lue semicircle of ill health, this latter effect heightened by an unnatural glow which colored his face like a low incessant fever. (Chapter – 1, May Day) Fitzgerald makes the reader view New York City as on May Day in 1919. Here the readers could experience everything like the society dance, scene that includes a disorderly crowd of war veterans and also office of a socialist newspaper. The protagonist in this story of Fitzgerald prefers to suicide rather than marry a lower-class woman who tried to seduce him. In 1922, Fitzgerald wrote another short story ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ which ould be referred more accurately as a fantasy. In this story refined vindictiveness of the Washingtons, who live on the top of a diamond mountain and want to murder their guests to keep up the secret of the place. Fitzgerald, in fact wants to make the reader get aware of the situation in United States at that time along with its capitalism with the help of Washingtons and this story can be best termed as a political metaphor. The time when this story was written, the economy was flourishing and the political system was full of suspicion and sense of isolation. The Washington’s country was depicted as complete in itself with natural resources, political prisoners, own defense system and so on. The writer artistically visualizes the situation and the reader is left spellbound with it. Washingtons even tried to bribe God, which shows that they had taken their isolated country to an extreme, which could be symbolic for United States. This unique style of Fitzgerald of relating present symbolically through his fictions was quite admired by his critics too. The time when he was writing was very sensitive and ny kind of direct attack on politics or prevailing situation would create lot of problems for him. So this was the right and matured style of writing to approach target readers. This is the reason why most of Fitzgerald’s stories are favorites among readers specially ‘May Day’ and ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’. Both the stories are different when plots are considered but the style and artistic visualizations used in both are remarkable. The characters and their feelings shown are quite natural and reader immediately gets into it.