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Selena Gomez once said that “Everything Is Not What It Seems”. Of course, she was referring to the Russo Family, the magical world they were a part of and how they were hiding in plain sight, but it also works for the characters in The Great Gatsby, Memento, A Little Life, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Human beings are complex creatures. Our emotions and thoughts are never fully understandable by others. Sometimes, we too don’t understand ourselves. A real life example of this would be me, or at least me when I was younger.
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you know that I’m gay. I don’t hide it, and I’m very open about it. But me 10 years ago didn’t know. I forced myself into having feelings for girls that I thought I should’ve had and played off the feelings that I had for boys as just that I wanted to be good friends with them. Fast forward 4 and a half years later, I realized that I was gay when someone ELSE told me. Granted, they were just doing it as an insult and didn’t actually aim to be correct, but they still were.
The characters from these novels are no different. I’m not saying they’re gay, but the idea that they are exactly what they present themselves to be is far from true. Take Gatsby, for example. From the beginning, he’s presented as Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire, but we later find out that his money comes from illegal activity. But Gatsby’s tale goes much deeper, a tale of love, heartbreak, and misfortune, and that’s exactly what makes him, a loving, materialistic, and emotionally convoluted character. He’s not the only one, either.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written by Robert Louis Stevenson, is about a doctor, Dr. Jekyll who consumes a potion, allowing him to transform into Mr. Hyde, a man-like creature with no conscience. Obviously, it goes very wrong, with Hyde’s personality leaking into Jekyll’s day to day life. At first glance, it seems as if Dr. Jekyll created this monster, but in reality, Mr. Hyde could be a physical manifestation of the darkness inside of him. That’s not to say that Dr. Jekyll by any means was a bad person, but as Mark Frost once said, “There can be no light without the dark”. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde meet a tragic ending, but their story is all the more tragic when you realize that, although this is just a story, it accurately represents humanity as a whole. Think of those commercials, usually about milk, where someone is trying to choose milk to buy, and on one of their shoulders rests a devil and the other an angel. They both make their case, and usually, the angel wins out, causing the devil to have some kind of dramatic exit (like poofing out of existence now that the person made the “right” choice). That fight is a daily battle, and sometimes we do the wrong thing for the right reason, or the right thing for the wrong reason, even if we don’t know it at the time. Dr. Jekyll is a perfect example of this. He says,
“If each, I told myself … could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that the agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling.” (Stevenson 94)
But he later says, “my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion”.
Jekyll also shows us his inability to accept that everyone has a fight between light and dark. He says,
“With every day, and for both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (Stevenson 107)
This concept of denial is very prevalent in our society today, especially when it comes to inner acceptance. For example, many LGBTQ+ kids live in denial because they don’t want to feel the heat from society, some even riots in their country’s capital because they’re too stubborn (and misled as well) to accept their presidential candidate’s loss, and move on for the good of their country. This major denial can also be applied to Leonard Shelby, from the movie Memento.
side note: can we talk about how hot this guy is?
Memento follows a man named Leonard Shelby, a man with no short term memory, trying to find the man who se***lly a****lted and murdered his wife. He doesn’t remember anything after the event that caused him to lose his memory, and so, he uses notes and tattoos to remind himself of what he’s learned before his memory resets.
He uses the story of Sammy Jankis, a man who had a similar problem to him, and who he deemed unworthy of insurance (as an insurance claims investigator). Throughout the movie, he retells parts of the story of Sammy in parts, until at the end, at which point we find out that he’s mixed the story of his life and Sammy Jankis' life up. He believes (or believed, until his memory reset) that in an attempt to test whether Sammy was faking, Sammy’s wife had him give her shots of insulin too many times to see if he’d remember (which he didn’t). The plot follows, and eventually, we see Sammy in a mental hospital, and for a split second, we see Lenoard in Sammy’s place.
From this, many may draw the conclusion that Leonard is denying the truth that HE was the reason his wife died. But in reality, that’s not the denial here - because Leonard couldn’t have denial of something that he did not know. The real denial here is that he can control what’s going on around him, through his notes and pictures and tattoos. We see him repeatedly be lied to, but he doesn’t know it. He doesn't realize how easily he can be taken advantage of.
He didn’t believe he could trust Teddy, which granted, he couldn’t, but he was told that by Natalie, who also lied to him. The truth here is that all of the information he’s collected has come from someone else at some point or another, but that doesn’t make it true. As Matt Goldberg described this movie, he said that “Leonard is lying to himself about his very identity, and his brain damage allows him to perpetuate this mythology endlessly” (Goldberg).
Jude from A Little Life, in comparison to the rest of these characters, doesn't tend to warp or deny his own reality. One of the things in A Little Life is the absence yet also the presence of religion. Yanagihara's novel does not enforce or center around religion in any way, yet it's ironic that the main character, who has gone through so much suffering's name is Jude. I didn't realize this when I read it, and I had to read an article from the New Yorker to make this connection, but in Christianity, Jesus had 12 apostles. One of them was named Jude, who just so happens to be the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes. Reading this novel hurt every inch of my soft, YA reading soul, but the idea that Jude is stronger than he thinks he is is front and center for his part of the story. Another thing that I failed to notice that this New Yorker article picked up was that Jude never once calls those who've hurt him in impermissible ways evil (Michaud).
What these characters all have in common is that no one of them are truly what they seem to be. Jay Gatsby seems to be this millionaire who loves to host parties. But we find out his name is not only not Jay Gatsby (it's James Gatz), but his fortune comes from crime and his entire life for years, including hosting parties, has revolved around one person and one person only - Daisy Buchanan. Although I don't doubt that Gatsby had a good heart, looking at him objectively, he goes from the symbol of the American Dream to essentially a stalker with style. While Gatsby was lying to everyone else, Jekyll was lying to himself. Jekyll wanted to ignore the dark part of him, so he lied to himself, and that resulted in his story becoming a tragic one. Leonard Shelby is a little bit more complicated because, while he may be lying to himself, he doesn't actually know it. He believes that he's on the path to finding his wife's killer when, in reality, the person who killed his wife is none other than himself. And Jude, sweet sweet Jude, got a world of pain and suffering that made him more complex than anyone can be - so full of love despite everything he's gone through - he couldn't even call the people who've done him wrong "evil".
Humans are complex. We lie to each other, and we lie to ourselves. Why? Maybe it's to protect ourselves. But we can never truly understand the "why" to everything. We just have to recognize that everything is not what it seems.
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