Both Jay Gatsby and Charles Foster Kane made their marks on the 20th Century in different ways. Both are very different yet similar in their attitudes about money and how it can buy the "world" and love and life in that no dream is to big. The two of them lose childhoods and both want to find a true love that they can't find. Gatsby and Kane both are self-made and feel that everything including love and happiness could be bought with money. However at the time of their deaths, they are lonely and unfulfilled.
Gatsby and Kane both came from the mid-west and both headed east to make it. They both come from odd family dynamics. Kane's mother wants to protect him from his brutal father. She says to Kane's father, "That's why he's going to be brought up where you can't get at him." This concern plus the money that was given to them were the motivations that forced his mother to make such a drastic decision.
That at a young age Kane would be taken away from his home by a man named Thatcher who supposedly was going to give him a good life and save him from the poverty and limitations in his environment. So the family dynamic in Kane's family is skewed because although his mother makes the decision to protect him, her son senses it as abandonment.Gatsby, on the other hand, had a very different family life. Gatsby has parents and no one else in his life besides Daisy. He left his home and family and joined the army. By 1923, Gatsby had improved his financial status to the point where he was a wealthy and polished gentleman.
However Gatsby's views of his life are distorted and hints of a disreputable past shadow him. Although he was able to assume a smooth veneer and a new name, we learn that he was not able to make the transition to healthy and respected life. Except for Daisy he lets go of his past and seemingly has moved on. In1917, she represented everything fine and valuable in life.
What he had not known was that she, like his dreams, was an illusion. Her wealth and her sophistication were only gilding. So both in the end had childhoods and that seems to explain why both felt they had a void they needed to fill. However both of them gain wealth and status as adults because they were taught how to earn a living.
Both Gatsby and Kane had strong male figures in their lives that helped them get an education and learn how to be successful at being rich. Gatsby had Cody a friend who taught him street smarts and how to earn his money. Cody offered Gatsby an education and money for college and left Gatsby money until Cody's girlfriend found a way to take it for herself. That is why Gatsby learns how to fend for himself and how to make his own way because he learned no one was just going to hand it to him. Although Cody taught him street smarts, Gatsby never truly understood a liberal education.
At college there was too much disparity between him and those born to that life.On the other hand, Kane learned how to run a business from his teacher Thatcher. Thatcher taught Kane business smarts by letting him run a newspaper and teaching him how to be an authority. Also Kane learned like Gatsby learned from Cody, that you have to make your own way.
In the end both had teachers in their lives that taught them how to be rich and earn money in different ways. However each of the men had their own dreams they want to reach and both thought they knew how to get them.Kane wants to run a newspaper and yet he has no clue where to begin. Therefore in order to succeed he does what he thinks is right; he ends up making up headlines to intrigue the readers and to elicit the support he needs to have the number one paper. Also he wants to find true love and believes that by giving a girl everything she wants he'll receive love.
Yet in the end he learns that money and wealth will only get you so far in life. Like Kane, Gatsby to wants to find love and he wants it by getting Daisy and winning back the girl he has loved for years. He thinks he can do that by showing off his riches and impressing her with his money. Also he thinks that he can easily renew the old relationship and make it perfect again. This is seen when he says to Nick the narrator "Can't turn back time?" No one can convince Gatsby that it is a fool's dream.
In the end, both men don't get what they want at all. Kane ends up without a wife to love, and dead, still holding onto "Rosebud", the lost relic of his youth. Gatsby also ends up dead, without Daisy, and still holding onto the dream that she'll run into his arms and it will all be like it used to before he left her and before she married Tom. Both Kane and Gatsby are very similar and yet different in both their attitudes about love and how to get it and life and the way you should live it.
In the end however both did not gain anything and died never fulfilling their dream entirely.
