It is always a difficult task to identify if someone has been lying to you, and is also very difficult to handle the truth when it is revealed. What lays beneath most lies is usually something that someone is attempting to cover up, and prevent from others knowing. In these two stories, this is a very common occurrence. The two works that were compared were, F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, where the protagonist, Jay Gatsby was deeply in love with Daisy Buchanan, and tried to do everything in his power to bring them back together. The play that this novel was compared to was Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, where the protagonist, Blanche Dubois, had to leave her home and stay with her sister Stella, and Stellas new husband Stanley. Conflict between Blanche and Stanley began as soon as she arrived. After reading both pieces of literature, it has been discovered that there are similarities present when compared to one another. Although superficially, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Great Gatsby are quite different works of literature. On closer examination they seem to convey very similar ideas about our relationship to the past. Indeed, both Williams and Fitzgerald, through their protagonists, suggest that people who have a damaged past will attempt to lie and deceive others to negate their past, so they have a more preferred future. In their respective stories both Jay Gatsby and Blanche Dubois used deception as a means to erase their pasts and to start a new life. In these two works of literature the protagonists both used their lies and deception to: cover or change the story of their past, cultivate a persona that masked their true past, used fantasy to try to escape their past, fool others by only focusing on the good parts of their past. Each of the stories protagonists were both equally guilty for covering or changing the story of their pasts throughout their respective piece of literature.
