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Role of the setting in the great gatsby
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The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is filled with widely differentiating settings that are characteristic to the time the novel was set in. The settings in this novel are essential to revealing the characters and their behavior. Fitzgerald divides the world of the characters in the novel into three major settings : East Egg/ West Egg, Valley of Ashes and New York City. Each of these settings both reflects and determines the value of people who live and/or work there. Just like the settings, the people in this novel are widely differentiating along with their attitudes and characteristics.
East Egg is the home of the wealthy, prestigious, old money families. The people who live in East Egg feel no need to show off their money because the prestigous names they carry do that for them. Daisy and Tom Buchanan are the only people in this novel that live here and they are certainly proud to do so. Their home which is well beyond the stature of a middle class home is quite classy yet not nearly as flashy as their neighbors across the Manhassett Bay. Next is West Egg, the home of people wealthier than the East Egg members but don't maintain nearly the amount of prestige, where Nick Carraway and Jat Gatsby live. Nick lives here because he is too poor to afford a home in East Egg; Gatsby lives there because his money is "new" and he doesn't have the credentials to be accepted into East Egg. In order to try to be an equal to the East Egg families, the West Egg families show off their money every chance they get. Jay Gatsby is a great example of this in that he drives an extravagant yellow Rolls Royce and throws lavish parties at his home in an attempt to get noticed by just the right people.
The dreadful Valley of Ashes is i...
... middle of paper ...
...laws, and lifestyles.
While the characters tried to live a seemingly perfect life, everything wasn't all champagne and yellow Rolls-Royces. Myrtle and Tom's affair resulted in her death, which leads to a distraught George on the hunt for his wife's killer. After hearing from Tom that it was Gatsby who killed her, George murders him in his own pool then turns the gun on himself. After going through many ups and downs, Daisy and Tom's relationship goes from futile and destructive to being tolerable. Nick decides to leave town and get away from all the drama that envelopes New York City. The characters in this novel are selfish, foolish, naive, controlling and contradicting at times. You never know what you're going to see and experince in this city, and you may never want to.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner, 1927. Print.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic, The Great Gatsby, tells a story of how love and greed lead to death. The narrator of the novel, Nick Carraway, tells of his unusual summer after meeting the main character, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s intense love makes him attempt anything to win the girl of his dreams, Daisy Buchanan. All the love in the world, however, cannot spare Gatsby from his unfortunate yet inevitable death. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald utilizes the contrasting locations of East Egg and West Egg to represent opposing forces vital to the novel.
It is New York in the 1920s. Nick Carraway moves to the West Egg from Minnesota. He lives in a small house next to Jay Gatsby, a mysterious man who throws lavish parties, and decides he wants to know more about him. Then conflicts ensue about affairs and the secrets about all of the characters’ pasts. Nick, Daisy, and Tom (Daisy’s husband) “hang out” and later on, Gatsby joins on their travels. One day, when they are on an outing, Daisy hits Myrtle (Tom’s mistress) accidentally with Gatsby’s car and Myrtle dies. Tom then assures Daisy that they will cover up who killed Myrtle. Wilson thinks Gatsby killed his wife, so in a fit of madness goes to Gatsby’s house and kills him and
In a nation, two communities can often differ from each other. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses his writing to contrast the morality described by Nick Carraway in the Midwest, to the corruption and inhumanity that is quite starkly present in the East.
... Nick makes a small funeral for Gatsby and Daisy does not attend it. He took the blame for her, and he is dead all because of her, he sacrificed for her. She and Tom decide to travel and take off. Also Nick breaks up with Jordan, and he moves back to Midwest because he has had enough of these people, and hates the people that were close to Gatsby and for bareness, emptiness, and cold heart they have of the life in the middle of the wealthy on the East Coast. Nick realizes, and reveals that Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was ruined by money and un-loyalty, dishonestly. Daisy all she cared about is wealth, she chased after the men that have a lot of money. Even though Gatsby has control, influence, and authority to change his dreams into making it into real life for him this is what Nicks says makes him a good man. Now both Gatsby’s dream and the American Dream are over.
Throughout The Great Gatsby, various locations are introduced that correlate to specific types of inhabitants. The geography of the novel is primarily comprised of four scenes: East Egg, West Egg, the valley of the ashes, and New York City. Although all of the localities are situated in the East, Nick muses at the end of the novel that the story is, in actuality, “of the West” (Fitzgerald 176). This discovery insinuates that the materialisms of the East besmirched the characters of the West, symbolizing the deteriorating effects the quest for riches has on traditional values. Employing the four major settings, Fitzgerald is able to translate the moral and social corruption of society which dramatically contrasts with the conventional ethics of the West. F. Scott Fitzgerald utilizes setting and its inhabitants in order to represent the theme of artificiality as well as the corrupt nature of the materialistic pursuit of wealth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is well known for being an excellent writer, for expertly describing the Jazz Age, and for having a drinking problem. However, he is not so well known for creating deep and intriguing characters. In The Great Gatsby, the majority of the characters remain one-dimensional and unchanging throughout the novel. They are simply known from the viewpoint of Nick Carraway, the participating narrator. Some insight is given into characters in the form of their dialogue with Nick, however, they never really become deep characters that are 'known' and can be identified with. While all of the participants in the novel aren't completely flat, most of the main characters are simply stereotypes of 1920's people from the southern, western, and eastern parts of America.
East Egg is home to the more prominent established wealth families. Tom's and Daisy's home is on the East Egg. Their house, a "red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay" with its "wine-colored rug[s]" is just as impressive as Gatsby's house but much more low-key (Fitzgerald 11)(13). East egg and Tom's home represents the established wealth and traditions. Their stable wealth, although lacking the vulgarity of new wealth, is symbolic of their empty future and now purposelessness lives together. The House also has a cold sense to it according to Nick. This sense symbolizes Tom's brutality, and as Perkins's says in his manuscript to Fitzgerald "I would know...Buchanan if I met him and would avoid him," because Tom is so cold and brute (Perkins 199).
...and the upper middle class members mixed in the neighborhood, creating a disturbing mix. West Egg provided a direct confrontation to the establishment that disturbed the rich such as Daisy Buchanan (107). The residents of the city have foreign names like “Joens”, “Muldoon”, and “Eckheart” with uncouth professions such as actors and politicians (63). Epitomizing the qualities of the people and the buildings of West Egg is Jay Gatsby. Gatsby possesses a house designed to imitate royalty. However, Gatsby fills that very house with the risque parties, juxtaposing the old idea of wealth with a new one. The juxtaposition between the two ideas strongly characterizes the West Egg resident.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life. The occasional insights into character stand out as very green oases on an arid desert of waste paper. Throughout the first half of the book the author shadows his leading character in mystery, but when in the latter part he unfolds his life story it is difficult to find the brains, the cleverness, and the glamour that one might expect of a main character.
“I lived in West Egg, the – well, the less fashionable of the two... Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water.” (The Great Gatsby 5). This separation distinguishes the Buchanan’s from the others such as Gatsby. This idea of wealth and where you are located divides the two types of people geographically and socially. West...
Setting is essential to any good novel, it envelopes the entire work and pervades every scene and line for, as Jack M. Bickham said, “when you choose setting, you had better choose it wisely and well, because the very choice defines—and circumscribes—your story’s possibilities”. F. Scott Fitzgerald created a setting in The Great Gatsby that not only is an overarching motif in the story, but implants itself in each character that hails from West Egg, East Egg, and the Valley of Ashes. West Egg, symbolizing the new, opportunistic rich, representative of the American dream, East Egg, the established, aristocratic rich, and the Valley of Ashes, the crumbling decay of society, are linked together in the “haunted” image of the East, the hollow, shallow, and brutal land that Fitzgerald uses to illustrate the hollow, shallow, and brutal people living there (176).
The author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, meant for the setting and geography of the novel to relate to its themes, characters, and thoughts so readers would connect a place, person, and idea. There are many important geographical locations in The Great Gatsby. Each of these is specifically selected to correspond to an explicit person or central idea in the novel. The setting is also tremendously significant to The Great Gatsby, as it emphasizes the themes and character traits that drive the novel’s critical events. Without this important correspondence, the novel may not have had the effect on its readers that the author intended it to. If the reader is attentive to the details of the location and setting, the story will begin to unfold a series of comparisons providing more information about how a character really feels, or foreshadowing to what is to come.
The Great Gatsby is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s. The story is narrated by Nick Carraway as he moves from the Midwest to New York City, in the fictional town of West Egg along Long Island. The story is primarily focused on the attractive, young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his love for Daisy Buchanan. Pursuing the American Dream, Nick lived next door to Jay Gatsby, and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy, and her husband,Tom Buchanan. It is then that Nick is drawn into the striking world of the riches' lusts, loves, lies and deceits. The Great Gatsby explores themes of love, social changes, and irony, creating a image of the Golden Twenties that has been described as the tale about the American Dream.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald took place in the 1920’s when the nation was undergoing rapid economic, political, and social change. Looking through different literary lenses the reader is able to see the effects of these rapid changes. The marxist lens reflects the gap between rich and poor while the feminist lens showcases the patriarchal society.
The passage of this commentary comes from Chapter 1 of The Great Gatsby. In this passage, Nick goes to East Egg to see his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan. He is also introduced to Jordan Baker, a famous golfer. East Egg is a place in Long Island where people with ‘old’ money reside, while West Egg contains individuals with ‘new’ money. In this passage, Fitzgerald highlights how wealth and character coincide to produce the superficial benefits of living in East Egg.