The Great Gatsby
It is a rather pathetic yet romantic story narrated by Nick Carraway. Living in New York City, he dines with his married distant relative Daisy from time to time and soon become acquainted with his millionaire neighbor Jay Gatsby through a fancy party. Gatsby is having an affair with Daisy, which is discovered by Daisy's husband Tom, who has a mistress called Myrtle. Gatsby accidentally killed her while driving Daisy home and was shot by her husband George later, who mistook him for the her paramour. At the end of the story, Nick leaves New York and back to the west.

Pursue for Wealth and Success
Gatsby fabricates his own identity each night, “[adding] to the
pattern of his fancies"(99). He invents and revises himself as a millionaire who enjoys the life he is living. This constant reinvention of his identity comes from the deep down self consciousness. This self consciousness is responsible for propelling Gatsby to get rid of his past and chase after the potential wealth and success.

Languages's Effects
For The Great Gatsby, how languages are exchanged is especially interesting in how it demonstrates the societal values. Most of the information circulates through rumors with truth remaining unknown.
Daisy refers to herself as “sophisticated” precludes sincerity when talking to others. Besides, her voice is always emphasized in the novel rather than meaning of words as "her voice muffled in the thick folds"(92) is depicted. She also loves gossiping, which can be seen from her revealing a "family secret"(16) to Nick at their dinner at her house.

Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary tells the bleak story of a marriage that ends in tragedy. Charles Bovary, a good-hearted but dull and unambitious doctor, marries Emma, a beautiful farm girl raised in a convent. However, Emma grows increasingly unhappy with her life, and even the birth of their daughter, Berthe, brings Emma little joy. She soon turns to Rodolphe, the landowner and an aquaintance Léon. However, this attempt to escape from her marriage failed twice and drives her crazy. Emma gets to indulge herself in countless debts that she commits suicide out of desperation.

A Small Place
The first section begins with Kincaid’s narration of the reader’s experiences and thoughts as a hypothetical tourist in Antigua. The second section deals with Kincaid’s memories of the “old” Antigua, the colonial possession of Great Britain. Kincaid recalls the casual racism of the times, and the subservience of Antigua to England and, especially, to English culture. The third section, the longest, deals with Antigua’s present and begins with Kincaid asking herself the disturbing question of whether, considering the state of the island today. Finally, she talks about the "unreal" beauty of the island in the last section and how it parallels with its present.

What Emma desires for have changed gradually throughout her life. At first, she anticipates her marriage with Charles as a life of adventure since he seemed mysterious and glamorous. However, she soon finds that she is disillusioned and her only excitement derives from the flights of fancy she takes while reading sentimental romantic novels. "The happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come" (30). Emma grows increasingly unhappy with her middle-class existence in a small town and seeks an way out through having affair with a local landowner and a clerk. Emma is suffering from a struggle between city life that represents glamor and luxury and the country life that she feels impotent to run away from. The happiness she feels in this marriage thus become crazier and more desperate.

A Raisin In the Sun
This play tells the story of a lower-class black family's struggle to gain middle-class acceptance. Each character in the plat is attempting to live the "good" life that they think is the best for their family. After countless arguments and realizations, they achieve a fairly happy ending for pursuing their dream.

The Dispossessed
It is a story involving two cultures, one called Anarres where community and sharing is the key and another one called Urras where capitalism is the key. A physicist Shevek seeks a proper place to write his The General Temporal Theory. In this process, he finds out underlying truths about his supposedly utopian society Anarres, secrets of Urras where he lives for some time and other alien civilizations.

Antigone
Polynices and his brother Eteoclesare both killed by each other in Thebes. Antigone wishes to bury both properly while only one is deemed worthwhile by Creon. After he finds out Antigone is the one who offers a burial for Polynices, he sentenced her to death. However, at the end of the play, Creon changes his heart. Yet, it was too late to save either Antigone or his son Haemon or his wife. He was left alone just like how Antigone died--no one mourns for neither of them.

Different languages and words with similar meanings between Anarres and Urras have always been noted in the novel. For example, there are no possessive pronouns in Pravic while they are prevalent in Iotic, making translations hard. Literally, Shevek teaches himself Iotic while he reads physics and writes his theory. This impedes some efficient communication between Shevek and the Urrasti at first. Language is not one's own. Rather, it is societal and cultural. It symbolizes different values of different societies regarding a good life.

Love/Marriage
Like Gatsby, Charles is also pursuing a relationship with Emma, which turns out into a life-long marriage. He is easily contented with his marriage. It seems that Charles care more about Emma than Emma cares about him in their relationship, which is due to his satisfaction with mundane life. This is rather an unbalanced marriage. Charles is proud to have Emma as his wife. He relates to her and feels he shares something with her, considering her as a desirable possession. He is attracted to her because he sees in her the socially warm and radiant person he wants to be. However, Emma has soon grown tired of him either because his lack of ambition or because of her excessive desire for extremely materialistic life.

Keng, the Terran ambassador, doesn't understand Shevek at first, not knowing his stubbornness in offering the General Temporal Theory to all of the universe--not just one planet but the whole civilization. She seems to be assimilated by the Urras idea of buying and selling and possessing whereas Shevek insists in sharing for the common good.

Considering that we can only see what the narrator wants us to see, then can we fully trust them?

The good life that's thought to be sought turns out to be nothing, especially when Nick ponders at the end, "He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.

Different Opinions on Success
Charles wishes to be a good doctor with no ambition and Emma thinks that he is not successful.
This is partly because Charles only wants a stable life, with which he is already satisfied. Even though Charles had dreams when he was younger, his inherent laziness makes him give up. Emma, on the contrary, is very ambitious, trying to seek happiness and vanity from her husband. She almost fainted when she knows that Charles failed to cure a disabled man in their town and that his reputation is destroyed.

All imitation is bound up with class. Class influences all aspects of life. Myrtle mentions this with regard to her husband, George, whom she mistook for someone of better “breeding” and hence greater prospects.

Family Relationship
The relationship between Takver and his daughter Sadik and Shevek seems oddly formal and distant to me. Yet, they treat each other with respect and a sufficient degree of love to provide each other a sense of a family. Especially towards the end of the story when they are together in the desert, everything appears peaceful and qualifies as a good example for a desirable life.

Lack of Freedom
Natives actually do not have any freedom to govern themselves. They even don't have the right to give advice for the officers. Because of slavery and being ruled from afar for so long, the Antiguans have become accustomed to being passive objects of history, rather than active makers of it. The experiences of the colonized are therefore always secondary in some sense; it is the people from the “large places” who determine events, control history, and even control language. The colonized society is responsible for the lack of freedom, for a miserable life of its citizens.

Community is what formulates Anarres and incorporates citizens while it is also what alienates people from having a good life. Communal living is the motivation and the basis for Anarres people. Nontheless, it also deems people who refuse job postings as "nuchnibi" and let others distance them. No law involved, just words and communal power of the majority.

The scene where they try out what prison is like in school could be a metaphor for the true values lies under the Anarres society.

Ruth's modest dreams of stability and her nurturing nature is her self-consciousness.

Beneatha's exploratioin of her identity is her self-consciousness.

Is American dream a "circle" like Beneatha describes? People are never satisfied and continues to chase after objects that are unattainable due to their conditions and finally see themselves at the origin.

She feels impotent in not being a white woman who may earn money much easier than a colored woman like her. This is the suffocating conditions under racial discrimination.

Beneatha even feels defeated for a while in the process. Instead of feeling idealistic about demanding equality for African-Americans and freeing Africans from the French and English colonizers, she broods about basic human misery. Never-ending human misery demoralizes her, and she no longer sees a reason to fight against it. Probably this is where all dreams end up, even though some get through and continue in this infinite line like Beneatha and some give up following.

Far from being a good listener, Walter does not seem to understand that he must pay attention to his family members’ concerns in order to help them.

The hope comes in where Walter realizes that buying the house is more important for the family’s welfare than getting rich quickly. Thus, he grows up into a real man by refusing Mr. Lindner's money and values his family more than anything.

Family appears to be a more important factor in this situation, which adds much more warmth to this play and leads it to a relatively happy ending.

Changez feels a part of New York, if not U.S., which is also a kind of tourist idea.

In both texts, characters seek to escape where they come from. Changez has a tie to his home yet he migrates to a different country as opposed to within a country. He reinvents himself like them--"a lover of America" just like how Gatsby reinvents himself as the successful millionaire.

In other words, Antiguans have been taught to admire the very people who once enslaved them.

Globalization forces third world countries like Pakistan to be dependent on first world countries in order to attain a position that they might otherwise have been able to attain independently

"Though life is good, he cannot help but notice a definite sense of alienation and loneliness coursing through Erica", whom he met in Greece and lived together since then. This is a possible metaphor for his relationship with America: seemingly close yet distant.

Is it America that he wishes to be connected with or is it the utopian idea of independence and equality that attracts him?

Individually, Antigone rejects impingement on the state. In fact, she is almost a self-autonomous woman who has no fear in anything, even when she is working against the state law. At the end of her life, she even chooses to hung herself instead of being forced into death.

By giving Polyneices a proper funeral, Antigone is obeying the morals set by the gods the Greeks honor and follow; in this case is that the dead should be given proper burial. Although Polyneices may have caused harm to Thebes, as a relative of a family who cares about him, Antigone’s decision to have a proper funeral for him is the right and respectful thing to do.

This question reminds me of the prison scene in The Dispossessed. Children create a so-called prison-like place in school and suggest that they all go in to experience what a prison is like. They make themselves villains.

Divine Law
Antigone is a threat to the status quo; she invokes divine law as defense of her actions, but implicit in her position is faith in the discerning power of her individual conscience. She sacrifices her life out of devotion to principles higher than human law.

How much does the organization of a society affect the good life? Shevek is still dissatisfied ostensibly in utopia, suggesting that the kind of society one lives in is never enough. Shevek is looking at Urras, and also Anarres. They spatially confronts each other just like how we also confront our own idealism.