all snares and traps and treacheries. My choice was to go there to find him beyond all people...now we are joined together...and no one to help either one of us"(50) Even though Santiago knows the inevitable outcome of the whole situation, he still pursues the great fish, almost as a test of himself, "I'll kill him" "in all his greatness and his glory" "Although it is unjust" " I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures."(66) Once Santiago catches his fish, he cannot believe it, he keeps looking at the fish "to make sure it was true."(100) But deep inside through experience he knows that there is never any real glory in the world, and that his good fortune cannot last, "if sharks come, God pity him and me." (68) Even though in the end, all that is left of Santiago's prize fish is a "skeleton"(122), Santiago accepts the fact that "they beat"(124) him, because life has taught him that in order to live we must just learn to accept misfortune as part of life. Experience has taught him that " a man can be destroyed but not defeated"(103)
             In contrast to the experienced responsible hero Santiago in Hemingway's the The Old Man and The Sea, we see the imaginative dreamer hero Jay Gatsby, from The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. Jay Gatsby has an intensely romantic imagination, so intense that he cannot separate reality from his dreams. Nick describes this attribute in Gatsby as him having "some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life."(6) Jay Gatsby has a belief in fairytales and happy endings, a belief that life can be special, extraordinary, and exquisite. Gatsby is not interested in money or prestige directly. What he wants is his dream, to have Daisy as his own and he puts importance on wealth and fine things, because he knows Daisy loves these things. When Gatsby first brings Daisy to his house, "...