When done correctly, reading about a character’s quest for love is a favorite ingredient in some of the most beloved tales. In general, we enjoy seeing passionate characters going after something they want. It can really get us going when what they want is seemingly unattainable. Characters in love can certainly go to extremes in their search for the desired mate. We enjoy seeing how far they will go and whether or not they win the love they seek. In the end, are we satisfied if love is finally unrequited? Or should we get our happy ending and watch the lovesick character get what she wants?
In The Great Gatsby, the main character, Jay Gatsby, is in love with the elegant and married Daisy Buchanan and has been for a long time. As the jazz standard would say, Gatsby “did it wrong and that ain’t good.” He is so in love with Daisy that he has built her entire life by doing what he thinks it will take to win her over: getting to the upper class by making a lot of money. The idea isn’t that far-fetched, this being the 1920s when people seemed quite comfortable choosing friends and lovers based on the size of their bank accounts. Poor Gatsby, coming from a penniless and uneducated background, definitely had his work cut out for him. It doesn’t really seem to matter how Gatsby managed to make all that money and buy that mansion. (He manages to hide it pretty well.) The fact is, he did. And it worked. With a little push and some help from Nick, Gatsby gets the girl, more or less. Of course, in the end, though, he ultimately loses. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s experience of watching the American dream dissolve in the Great Depression, Gatsby and Daisy’s adventure is a fleeting moment that ends in darkness.
Pip from Great Expectations has no easy task fixing his sights on Estella. The girl is out of the league for her. The Victorian class system was even more rigid than America’s in the 1920s and poor Pip, the orphan ruined as a joke, seems to be fighting a losing battle. We stay with Pip and cheer him on as he tries and tries to reinvent himself. Pip is lucky with some unexpected money and may become a “gentleman”. The ending as we know it shows Pip and Estella finally ending up together. It’s not a wedding or pregnancy like a blockbuster romance movie, but we’re left with hope. The original ending that Charles Dickens wrote didn’t end so happily. Pip and Estella do not end up together, and in fact are never seen again. The ending we all know, where Pip and Estella end up together, is certainly more satisfying and less depressing. Is there something we see in Pip’s love for Estella that we don’t see in Gatsby for Daisy? Why are we okay with Gatsby losing everything in the end? Is it more gratifying to see him dead than to see him finally live without Daisy? Is a satisfying love story really more about our main character and the search for him and less about the actual ending?
