FREE ESSAY ON WUTHERING HEIGHTS, LORD JIM, THE GREAT GATSBY, AND A PASSAGE TO INDIA

WUTHERING HEIGHTS, LORD JIM, THE GREAT GATSBY, AND A PASSAGE TO INDIA

A protagonist is defined as a leading character in a written piece. The protagonist in a
novel sets the story and frequently leads the plot. The protagonists can be analyzed to
reveal the moral or meaning of a story. In the following essay, four main characters will
be analyzed from E.M. Forester's A Passage to India, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights,
Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
In E.M. Forester's A Passage to India, the main character, Dr. Aziz, is a Moslem doctor
living in Chandrapore. He is a widower with three children who meets Mrs. Moore, an aged
English widow who has three children herself and becomes friends with her. Even though
Dr. Aziz is a munificent and caring man towards his English friends, after Adela Quested
charges him with assault he becomes bitter, vindictive and developed more than hard
feelings towards the British. When Ms. Quested experiences a mental collapse, the British
assume that her circumstance was the result of sexual molestation and falsely accuse Dr.
Aziz of this crime. When Dr. Aziz is found not guilty, he builds up a relentless hatred,
not only for the British, but also for his own attorney. Dr. Aziz's newfound viewpoint is
an immediate response to his discrimination and in this sense is a product of English
colonialism. 
A primary concern of A Passage to India is the change of Dr. Aziz's thoughts of the
British, from a bit submissive to an aggressive viewpoint. In due course, Dr. Aziz
realizes that he must judge and undertake the English on a personal and an individual
basis. To carry this out, his attitude toward the English should be based on his direct
experience with people, not on whether or not they are a European or an Indian.
One of the major themes of E. M. Forster's novel is cultural misunderstanding.
Contradictory cultural ideas and expectations dealing with hospitality, social
proprieties, and the role of religion in daily life are responsible for misunderstandings
between the English and the Indians. Aziz tells Fielding at the conclusion of the novel,
It is useless discussing Hindus with me. Living with them teaches me no more. When I
think I annoy them, I do not. When I think I don't annoy them, I do. E.M. Forster shows
how repeated misunderstandings can turn into cultural stereotypes and are often used to
validate the uselessness of attempts to try to bring different cultures together. 
The novel Lord Jim is the tale of Jim, an overly romantic seaman, who during a moment of
crisis loses his courage. Lord Jim is the story of a young ship's officer who makes an
incomprehensible mistake. Jim was the first mate on a pilgrim ship on its way to Mecca.
After the ship collides with an unseen object, it becomes in danger of sinking. Jim
abandons the ship, leaving the human cargo to fend for themselves. Jim was branded a
coward and stripped of his license as a sailor, and was unable to bear the disgrace
attached to his life for a brief moment of cowardice. He is dogged by the guilt of what
he did and spends years drifting around the East trying to find a way to redeem himself.
Eventually, he ends up in the forests of Malaysia where he becomes a god-like protector
of the natives and is given the label of Lord. Even though he was given this title and he
his followers consider him a success, he is not able to forget his moment of weakness.
Jim's egocentricity stops him from going on with his life and condemns him to a life of
voluntary exile, the whole time believing that he is not good enough to live in the
outside world. He is willing to risk any future happiness and fortune to be able to face
his demons once again without losing his nerves. Ironically, it is Jim's last heroic act
that destroyed all the good that Jim had built up, essentially bringing chaos to his
world. 
Lord Jim's tale is presented as a lesson to everyone. Just because an individual does
something wrong doesn't mean that they can run away from their problems. After a life of
torturing himself, for his perceived cowardice and shortcomings, Jim receives a chance at
redemption. For his lonely display of honor and bravery, he receives a bullet in the
chest. Yet, did he have another option? He could run away from his predicament again and
choose life. The reward for this action, another start somewhere else where he would
torture himself the rest of his life or until he failed again. In the end, there was no
other choice for Jim. He was compelled to act because the alternative of escape that he
had been living was already worse than the death his actions would bring on. Unable to
live with the guilt any longer, Jim chooses suicide. It seems that Conrad suggests to us
that reaching perfection is less important than learn to accept ourselves as we are.
Wuthering Heights is a novel written by Emily Bronte that is full of love, hate and
revenge. This is a tale about Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff and the peculiar love
that they share. Brought together as children, Catherine and Heathcliff quickly become
attached to each other. As they grow older, their companionship turns into obsession.
Family, class, and fate work brutally against the two of them, as do their own jealous
and volatile natures, and much of their lives are spent in revenge and frustration. Their
love changes in many ways, taking many different forms, from anger, to happiness, to
violence. Their love changes due to the people that come in and out of both of their
lives, making them different. Through the book, though, Catherine and Heathcliff are able
to find ways to share their love. 
Heathcliff's main goal in this novel was revenge. Despite his love for his beloved Cathy,
Heathcliff wants a desperate revenge upon her family. It was, after all, her family who
supposedly ruined his life. When Cathy's father brings home a dirty orphan, did not know
what to think. As the two got older, Cathy and Heathcliff fell in love. One day, Cathy
goes away and doesn't come back for a while. When she finally comes back to visit, she
has fallen in love with Edgar Linton, a rich, upper-class man. This makes Heathcliff
exceedingly jealous. When Cathy is lying on her deathbed, she tells Heathcliff she loves
him, and when she dies Heathcliff tells her to haunt him and to never leave him. It is a
demonstration of undying love and the extents that people will go to for the one that
they love. 
The Great Gatsby is a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's impracticable
passion for the young Daisy Buchanan. The pair meets five years before the novel begins.
They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, but
extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit
of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same
thing. Her voice is full of money, Gatsby says, in one of the novel's famous quotations.

The narrator of the story, Nick Carraway comes from a well-to-do Midwestern family. He
comes to New York to enter the bond business, and becomes involved with the affair
between Gatsby and the Buchanans. Although seemingly honest, responsible, and fair, Nick
nevertheless shares some of the less desirable traits of his acquaintances. He can be
equally careless with others' emotions. Yet among the characters he is the only one who
realizes the greatness of Gatsby compared to his contemporaries. Nick showed any of the
sensibility that there was throughout the novel. Even though Nick represented the middle
class striving to raise their status, he maintained his ground. Through the experiences
that he had gone through being with the high society, there was a major turning point for
him. Nick realized that the corrupt and shallow class had absolutely no morals. From
there he moved back West, too afraid that he may experience what Gatsby had experienced.
Jay Gatsby on the other hand, was somewhat of a mystery man. He was a mystery because he
was never seen directly, only through other people's perceptions. Nobody really knew his
identity or him as a person. Gatsby was on a quest in search of something that meant his
whole life to him. He wanted to relive the past that he had with Daisy and didn't stop
for a second to come back to reality, even though other people told him otherwise.