1. Jordan Baker inThe Great Gatsby
Jordan is quite unlike many of the other characters in the novel because of her seeming complacency toward much of what occurs. She fends for herself in addition to living off the money she has from her wealthy family by playing golf and associating with "the right kind of people." She also controls much of what happens to her by not caring much about what happens to others. For example, she cheats in a golf game, because she desires to win and is not concerned about what she has to do to accomplish that goal. She ruins a friend's car and almost injures Nick in a car incident, but lies about the former and brushes off the latter.
At the novel's end, Fitzgerald does imply that Jordan is not as invulnerable as she would like to appear. She was truly hurt by Nick's abandonment of her and accuses him of "throwing her over." But again, her interest in the topic is based on how Nick affected her, not what he or others endured at the hands of the Buchanans.
2. sins ofcommission and omission
Sin of omission
In Catholic teaching an omissionis a failure to do something one can and ought to do. If this happens deliberately and freely, it is considered a sin.
The degree of guilt incurred by an omission is measured, like that attaching to sins of commission, by the dignity of the virtue and the magnitude of the precept to which the omission is opposed, as well as the amount of deliberation.
A person may be guilty of a sin of omission if he fails to do something which he is able to do and which he ought to do because he has put himself into a state or situation whereby he is unable to complete the action. For example, if a person chooses to become inebriated and is therefore unable to perform a necessary task, that person is responsible for that failure, even though that person is physically unable to perform the task because he or she knowingly put themselves into a state (drunkenness) where accomplishing the task was impossible.
3. Julian English in Appointment in Samarra
Appointment in Samarra is also the title of a 1934 novel by American writer John O’Hara. The book is about the self-destruction and suicide of the fictional character Julian English, a wealthy car dealer who was once a member of the social elite of a fictional Pennsylvanian town but spends three days on a spree of self-destructive acts that culminate in his demise. Maugham’s short fable is referred to in an epigraph for the novel.
In some ways Julian, with his money, his beautiful wife, his perfectly tailored clothes, his starched collars and waxed-calf shoes, his Kappa Beta Phi key, and his assured position in society, is the person O’Hara dreamed of being. Yet in the novel— this is perhaps the crucial point ofAppointment in Samarra—it’s not enough. There’s an emptiness in Julian, a sense that life has already offered him all there is and it’s a disappointment. But O’Hara had still another quality: a toughness and grittiness, a determination to succeed and prove others wrong, that made him get up every morning—or, more likely, every afternoon—his head pounding, light another cigarette, and start typing.
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