The Technique In The Great Gat
The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's finest novel, it was published in1925, and Eliot considered it "to be the first step that America has taken since Henry James"1. It is a sensitive and symbolic treatment of themes of contemporary life related with irony and pathos to the legendry of "American dream".Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner who sells bonds in New York, lives at West Egg, Long Islands, which is separated from the city by an ashdump, whose distinctive feature is an oculist's faded billboard with a pair of great staring eyes behind yellow spectacles, symbolic of an obscenely futile world. Nick's neighbor is mysterious Jay Gatsby, whose mansion and fabulous entertainments are financed by bootlegging and other criminal activities. As a poor army lieutenant, Gatsby had fallen in love with Nick's cousin Daisy, who later married Tom Buchanan, an unintelligent, brutal man of wealth. Through Nick, he manages to meet Daisy again, impresses her by his extravagant devotion, and makes her his mistress. Her husband takes as his mistress Myrtle Wilson, sensual wife of a garage man. When her husband becomes jealous and imprisons her in her room, Myrtle escapes, runs out on the highw
The author can thus move at will from one place to another, one time to another, one character to another, and one can even spend his or her own views directly to the reader as the work goes along. Imaging that I, too, was harrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate in this passage, with its precise use of detail that mingles several qualities of sensation in a swift interplay of mood, feeling, and idea, the tonal proportions of the colloquial rhythms of the first sentence that evoke and lengthen, though its strong liquid properties, the extent of Nick's longing for the warmth and attachment the experience suggests, the sudden withdrawal and running-away of the emotion expressed in the half-nostalgic, half-ironic "I wished them well", indicates the degree to which Fitzgerald's imagination had matured along with the sense of poetic artistry which could compress and modulate variations of action, character, and atmosphere in words that could feel through to the essential quality of a situation and reproduce its most accurate over tones. Citing Gatsby as his source, Nick informs the reader of Gatsby's days with Dan Cody: "James Gatz-that was really, or at least legally, his name. But we do not learn what they think unless they tell us. A story told in this manner gains not only in verisimilitude, however, but also in suspense: pieces of the protagonist's life can be so arranged and revealed as to create mystery. The list continues for some two pages, lists many people's name. Her eye-witness account begins: One October day in nineteen-seventeen-(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)-I was walking along from one place to another, half on the sidewalks and half on the lawns (72). Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all (60). But the same device imposes on the novelist the necessity of tracing through in the observer or narrator himself some sort of growth in general moral perception, which will constitute in effect his story. "That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him. "The Great Gatsby is constructed as a series of scenes dramatizing the important events of the story and connected by brief passages of interpretation and summary. Paul and Princeton, in the person of the legendary Jay Gatsby"6.
Common topics in this essay:
Doctor Eckleburg,
Mid-west Gatsby,
Nick Carraway,
Eckleburg God,
Egg Island,
Kaiser Wilhelm,
Invariably Nick's,
Gatsby Fitzgerald,
West Egg,
Edgar Beaver,
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green light,
eyes doctor eckleburg,
nick carraway,
eyes doctor,
doctor eckleburg,
east egg,
jordan baker,
omniscient view,
valley ashes,
informs reader,
light minute dock,
gatsby standing lawn,
nick informs reader,
single green light,
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Acceptance Essays
