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Comparing Love In The Great Gatsby And Othello

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Love: is it human’s greatest success or human’s greatest flaw? Are we as humans so pulled towards the false ideology of what love is supposed to be like that we completely lose sight of who we are as people in the process and willing to go to great, dangerous lengths to attain this unachievable love? We are forced to ponder this question as we are taken through a journey of love in both the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, and also William Shakespeare’s play, Othello. Readers are shown through both the novel and the play of the lives of the men who are so different yet portrayed as the same kind of fools in love—the dashing Jay Gatsby of West Egg and the Lieutenant Othello of Cyprus—in these tragedies that love is not just what …show more content…

First of all, the character Othello’s love for his wife Desdemona is soiled by Iago putting false images into Othello’s head that his wife is being unfaithful to him which ultimately leads him to kill his own wife because of his vulnerability and insecurity towards the pure love he had for her. Othello starts to feel things that he has never felt before towards his wife, “I had rather be a toad/And live upon the vapor of a dungeon /Than keep a corner in the thing I love/For others' uses. Yet 'tis the plague of great ones” (3.3.311-14). Iago is planting the seeds for Othello’s relationship with Desdemona to crumble by putting images into Othello’s head about women and generalizing all women saying that they all act upon their temptations with no remorse. In these lines said by Othello, he is showing how someone’s deceit (having to do with his love for his wife) can really go as far as to make him criticize a whole entire gender based on one idea that his Desdemona has been unfaithful—and he does not even have proof that this accusation is true. Secondly, Iago successfully alters Othello’s pure and true love for Desdemona so much that his once fulfilling …show more content…

As Othello is deciding to kill Desdemona, he speaks these words, “Ay, let her rot, and perish and be damned/tonight, for she shall not live. No, my heart is turned/to stone” (4.1.200-202). Iago has done such a good job at making Othello believe that Desdemona has been unfaithful that he, out of jealousy and anger, decides to kill her. He says it himself in these lines, that his heart has turned to stone which indicates that his whole heart did in fact once belong to Desdemona—and Othello is doing this without even having valid proof that she did anything

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