Nick Equals Holden -- Text-to-text Connection

         The character of Nick Carraway in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby can be likened to Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Holden, an adolescent teenager, goes through his troubled life in constant question of what childhood means; he endlessly searches for a way to retain his innocence. Unfortunately, Holden’s social ineptitude prohibits him from being honest with himself, much like Nick’s quality of not being able to grasp the idea of romantic love. Throughout Salinger’s timeless definition of how it feels to come to terms with adulthood, Holden ignores his feelings and instead keeps trying to prove all the “manly” things he can do, such as drinking alcohol and hiring prostitutes. Holden also describes certain flashbacks in intricate detail then abruptly changes the subject and acts as if that event was insignificant. However, it is easy for the reader to notice the sentiment behind his words, even if Holden chooses to hide those feelings from himself. Nick resembles Holden when he first describes his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom. He goes into elaborate detail about why the couple decided to move to East Egg, their individual life stories, and the lack of love he sees between them. Immediately following his in-depth description of Tom and Daisy, Nick puts forth: “And so it happened that on a warm windy evening [he] drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom [he] scarcely knew at all” (Fitzgerald 6). By proclaiming that he barely knows two people who he just described in great detail proves Nick’s social awkwardness and lack of desire to be perceived as caring and observant. Rather, Nick forces himself to act unaffected by his emotional attachments, just like Holden’s incapability to openly show emotion. Both are caught in a cycle of understating how much people and events mean to them; however, they feel admitting that they do in fact care seems weak and degrading and would thus rather remain neutral on the outside even if something is meaningful to them on the inside. Another instance when Nick tries to conceal emotion is when he speaks of the relationship between his friend Gatsby and Daisy. It is apparent that the two are deeply in love and want to be together, yet Nick chooses to heartlessly assert that “[Gatsby] felt married to her, that was all” (149). Coldly stating “that was all” solidifies Nick’s inability to cope with tender emotion. He wants to disregard love and act as if it means absolutely nothing. As with Holden, who has issues identifying and appreciating love, Nick pretends that nothing serious is happening between Gatsby and Daisy, when in reality, they want nothing more than to be together for the rest of their lives. In the end, Nick pushes away his chance at love out of fear, as does Holden, because of their aversions to emotion. Throughout Gatsby, Nick mirrors Holden’s incapability to cope with love and ends up hiding his true emotions from everyone around him, including himself.