While comparing Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Yzierska's The Bread Givers may seem like comparing apples and rocks, there is always more than what is simply seen. While on the surface, The Great Gatsby appears to be a novel of love, idealism, and of disillusionment, it is readily evident that what lies beneath, the wasteland that exists between New York and West Egg, is the true center and meaning of the book. Gatsby is a novel that presents us with one of the great enigmatic characters of American literature. Fitzgerald's novel centers around the very current idea that what lies underneath the surface is a corruption of ideals because those aspects of us such as love, faith, friendship, are forced to put on a false face and to deny themselves when viewed by others. Yzierska's, The Bread Givers, is also a novel of conflict between two equally distant worlds, the "Old World" of Europe and the "New World" of America. Bridging that gap is also just as difficult a task as Fitzgerald tackles. The purpose of this paper is to examine how each book takes on the task of jumping between two dissimilar worlds and how the attempts to sew them together ultimately fail. 6-pages, bibliography lists 3 sources.
