Jay Gatsby & Eponine From Les Miserables Compared

I first noticed the weight of unreturned love during a weekend last spring when I watched The Great Gatsby on Friday night and saw a staged production of Les Miserables on Saturday with my roommate. By Sunday morning, as I stared at my notebook trying to draft a character analysis for my literature class, I realized that Jay Gatsby and Eponine occupied nearly identical emotional territory despite living in completely different worlds. Both characters anchor their entire existence around loving someone who will never love them back, and both die without ever breaking free from that obsession.

Gatsby throws extravagant parties hoping Daisy will wander in, while Eponine follows Marius through the streets of Paris hoping he will finally see her. Though Gatsby operates in the glittering wealth of 1920s America and Eponine survives in the gutters of nineteenth-century France, their parallel paths reveal how destructive it can be to build your identity entirely around another person's affection.

I encountered Gatsby first during my senior year of high school, when his green light and tragic pool death felt distant and symbolic. Eponine came later, during my freshman year here at Ohio State, when my French literature professor assigned Victor Hugo's novel alongside the musical soundtrack. At first, they seemed like opposite types: Gatsby the wealthy mystery man, Eponine the scrappy street girl. But reading them within months of each other made their similarities impossible to ignore. Both characters exist on the margins of the social worlds they desperately want to enter. Gatsby can buy a mansion across the bay from Daisy, but old money will never truly accept him. Eponine grows up alongside Cosette as children, but poverty places her permanently outside the respectable life Cosette eventually inhabits. Their love becomes their only bid for belonging, which makes rejection not just painful but existentially threatening.

What strikes me most about both characters is how they use elaborate performances to mask their desperation. Gatsby constructs an entire false biography, complete with Oxford education and inherited wealth, because he believes the real James Gatz could never deserve Daisy Buchanan. Every party, every pink suit, every carefully chosen phrase serves the single purpose of becoming someone Daisy might love. When I wrote my paper comparing the two last semester, I spent an entire evening analyzing the scene where Gatsby shows Daisy his shirts, and I realized he was essentially begging her to validate his transformation. Eponine performs differently but just as intensely. She dresses as a boy to follow Marius through dangerous streets, hides letters from Cosette, and pretends to be tougher than she is. In the musical number "On My Own," she literally performs happiness while admitting that Marius never even notices her walking beside him. Both characters exhaust themselves maintaining an illusion because the alternative means admitting their love is hopeless.

The way each character approaches their final moments taught me something unsettling about the difference between privilege and poverty, even in romantic despair. Gatsby dies still believing in his dream, still reaching for that green light, shot by a man who mistakes him for someone else entirely. His death is random and absurd, but it happens in his own pool, surrounded by the wealth he accumulated. He never has to face the reality that Daisy has chosen Tom, because he dies before that truth fully registers. Eponine, by contrast, chooses her death with clear eyes. She deliberately steps in front of a bullet meant for Marius, and she uses her final minutes to confess her love to him knowing he cannot return it. My roommate, who is a theater major, pointed out that Eponine's death scene gives her agency that Gatsby never claims. She decides when and how her story ends, while Gatsby remains passive even in death, waiting for a phone call from Daisy that will never come.

Someone might argue that these characters are not comparable at all because Gatsby is a villain and Eponine is a victim. Gatsby, after all, built his fortune through crime, lied to everyone around him, and pursued a married woman without regard for her child or her choices. My professor made this exact point when I presented my thesis in class, noting that Fitzgerald wants us to see Gatsby's corruption, not just his romanticism. Eponine, meanwhile, commits no real crimes beyond helping her parents with petty theft as a child, and she ultimately sacrifices herself for the revolution and for Marius's safety. She seems purely sympathetic in a way Gatsby never does. I have thought about this distinction throughout the semester, and I think it reveals something about how class shapes our perception of obsessive love. We forgive Eponine more easily because she has less power to abuse. Gatsby's wealth makes his obsession dangerous to others, but both characters damage themselves equally.

Now, months after writing that paper, I catch myself thinking about Gatsby and Eponine whenever I notice someone arranging their entire life around another person's attention. What I understand now that I did not when I started college is that both characters fail not because they love too much, but because they never develop a self separate from that love. Gatsby cannot tell you who he is without reference to Daisy, and Eponine cannot imagine a future that does not include Marius. Their tragedies are not about bad luck or wrong timing but about the absence of an identity that could survive rejection. I have watched friends do smaller versions of the same thing, reshaping their personalities and schedules around someone who barely texts back, and I recognize the Gatsby-Eponine pattern every time. The most honest thing either story offers is not a moral but a warning: love should add to who you are, not replace it entirely. I still do not know if that lesson makes their deaths more or less tragic, but I know it makes them harder to forget.

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