|
|
To sacrifice is not only to surrender something of value. It also involves making a choice between two sides; one in which you must let go. The art of sacrifice is explored through the many issues raised in both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In these texts, we are confronted with such characters as Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby and the significant figure of John Proctor from The Crucible. Both these characters sacrifice or surrender to something valued or desired for the sake of something else having a higher or more pressing claim. The sacrifices made by Nick Carraway and John Proctor are usually for the saving of their reputation, loyalty, integrity, and moral conscience. Both Nick Carraway and John Proctor are men who possess very similar principles. They are both men who value aspects of honour, honesty and loyalty greatly. In both The Great Gatsby and The Crucible, the composers have provided their characters with a challenge influencing their principles. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses the main narrator, Nick Carraway’s relationships to reveal Nick’s gradual abandonment of his principles of honesty, reputation and integrity. Like wise in The Crucible, Miller has used dramatic tensions of a courtroom to display Proctor’s struggle to stick to his principles of honest opinions, morality, goodness and integrity. As we follow Nick Carraway throughout the novel, we come to learn that he gradually breaks away from his principles and values.
|
