The Rich Boy
Richard Lehan's evaluation of Anson Hunter, the main character in "The Rich Boy", is overall an acceptable one. Despite its vagueness and Lehan's inability to support his description and opinions about Anson Hunter with proof from Fitzgerald's short story, Lehan manages to capture, in his short account, the essence of Anson Hunter's character. Lehan is able to describe who this character is and why he behaves as he does. However, in analyzing the intriguing character Lehan, aside from not supporting his statements, also creates a few major misunderstandings, which leave a certain amount of perplexity of whether this overall analysis of Anson Hunter could be sufficiently accurate so as to appear in a collection of Fitzgerald's short stories. Lehan's first sentence is without any doubt a perfect evaluation of the main character of "The Rich Boy". Anson is definitely the type of person who "has such a sense of superiority that he can never reconcile himself to having been turned down by the beautiful Paula Legendre." However, Lehan fails to explain why Anson feels so superior. Fitzgerald best explains why Anson feels so superior when he states that "most of our lives end as a compromise - it was as a compromise that his
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. "The Rich Boy, " Lehan's second conclusion that Anson drove Sloane to suicide to get "his revenge of sorts" is proven untrue when the reader sees that, yes, Anson did interfere in the affair between Cary Sloane and his uncle's wife, Edna, but he merely dictated certain terms. By doing so he believed that he could save his family name and public embarrassment for his uncle, Robert Hunter. The terms given by Anson were that "Sloane was to leave town for six months...[and] when he returned there was to be no resumption of the affair, but at the end of a year Edna might, if she wished, tell Robert Hunter that she wanted a divorce and go about it in the usual way." After the encounter between Anson, Sloane and Edna, Sloane's body is found the following morning under a bridge. The cause of death was suicide. From the above passage it is evident that even though Anson did interfere in the affair he cannot, under any circumstances, be held responsible for Sloane's suicide. Sloane probably killed himself because he had a very weak character, unlike Anson who has a very dominant and strong character. However this difference in characters is not a valid reason to say that Anson drove Sloane to suicide.
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Approximate Word count = 931
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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