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As Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby are both incredibly famous american novels they both share a large number of similarities and differences. They each have the theme of searching for something from their past. Gatsby searches for the love of Daisy and Ahab searches for Moby Dick. Each story is being told through the 1st person narrative of a character who is not accustomed to the situation: the drama of a big new city for Nick Carraway, and being a sailor for Ishmael.

Paragraph 1 - atmosphere very personal, similar

Both story openings are similar considering the atmosphere the author tries to create. This atmosphere is incredibly personal and gives the reader the feeling as if they are being spoken to directly, or face-to-face, by the book, the narrator, and the author. It is an extremely well-used concept to hook readers, and the author’s of both The Great Gatsby and Moby Dick used this to their advantage in order to fix the reader’s attention on the story, and to keep reading. That is their intention, and one that seems to be especially successful. As shown by the following quote from The Great Gatsby, stating “In my younger and more vulnerable years”, it is evident that the author, or namely, the narrator, is speaking directly to the reader by using 1st person. Simply from the very first sentence in the story opening, one knows that the narrator is also a character within the story, and will often directly convey their deeply internal, personal, inner unspoken thoughts and feelings to the reader. Likewise, the story opening of Moby Dick, composed simply of 3 words: “Call me Ishmael”. It’s brilliantly simple. Three words, each carefully and precisely chosen. Moby Dick does not begin with "My name is Ishmael" or "I am Ishmael...

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...rt of the world.” The narrator, who the reader knows is named Ishmael, explains that whenever he feels depressed or incredibly gloomy, he always goes to sea. This is evident when he says “whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in [his] soul,” or whenever he finds himself “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses”, he mentions the fact that it is time “to get to sea as soon as [he] can”. In many ways, it is his form of escape and survival. Although Moby Dick’s and The Great Gatsby’s story openings seem to have very different plot lines and characters, the main ideas we gain from about the rest of the novel are incredibly similar. In both story openings introduce an addled character that seems disoriented in the world he currently lives in, by the advice he is given but somehow doesn’t consider, and by the suicidal thoughts that only seem to disappear at sea.