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Importance of Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby
East egg and west egg comparison in the great gatsby
Importance of Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby
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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. The setting of the novel is based on real locations in the state of New York. The two Eggs in the story supposedly mimic two landmasses that jut out into the Long Island Sound. The two peninsulas are separated by the Manhasset Bay. From his house, Gatsby can look across this bay and see the little green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. The bay is all that is keeping him from his one true love. The Manhasset Bay symbolizes the void between everyone and their dreams. The dreams seem so close that they are almost reachable, ...
Many forms of literature portray conflicting or contrasting areas in which each place has a significant impact on the story. These opposing forces add to the overall theme, symbolism and meaning of the story. In the ‘Great Gatsby’, by F. Scott Fitzgerald these areas are the ‘East Egg’ and the ‘West Egg’. To illustrate the East Egg represents the former or classic establishment. It consists of wealthy families who have handed down money from generation to generation. However the West egg includes money or fortunes that recently have been acquired. The West Egg sets the standard of the American Dream theme; working hard to become successful. Notably, the Great Gatsby reveals characters that come from both areas and impact the story and other locations.
Firstly, Tom and Gatsby both live opulent lives in Long Island, New York. Tom lives in East Egg, while Gatsby lives in West Egg. East Egg is the area where the old monied, upper-class, and highly respected people live. Whereas, West Egg is a community where the nouveau riche and self-made people
he has always wanted. And Daisy, the woman that Gatsby has always wanted. never gets, lives on East Egg. There is also a barrier of water between the two cities that keep people like Daisy and Gatsby apart from one another. and keeps them from reaching their goals and what they want in life.
The story takes place in an area near New York called "Long Island." It is in a shape of an egg. They focus in on places on there named "East Egg", "West Egg", and "The Valley of Ashes." West egg is for people who have recently made their fortunes. The characters Nick and Gatsby live there. The Valley of Ashes is for people who are not wealthy. The Wilson family lives there. The East Egg is for people who inherit their money. The characters Daisy and Tom live there. Daisy is a distant cousin one removed of Nick’s. One of her friends is a character named Jordan baker.
The novel mirrors the East-West divide of the whole country in the division between West Egg and East Egg. Nick and Gatsby live on West Egg, which means that they have retained their closeness to western values. The Buchanans on the other hand have become Easterners, they represent the corruption of the East.
The Great Gatsby is one of the most renowned books known to mankind. A story about a man’s quest to fit into a society built for the rich whilst wooing a childhood crush may seem extremely simple and straightforward, however, the mystery is not behind the plot, but rather, it is in the writing itself. The words F. Scott Fitzgerald used were chosen with such delicacy, one cannot even hope to assume that anything was a mere coincidence. The book is laced with intricate strands of symbolism bound together by a single plot. One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more major themes is the use of locations. The importance of location as symbols are further expressed through the green light at the end of the dock as well as the fresh, green breast of the new world.
The houses in West Egg, were owned by people of new money. Lottery winners, young gamblers, and even smart men with low paying jobs in the bonds industry. There are two men that we get to know in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that live in West Egg. First, the man himself, Mr. Jay Gatsby. His house is known for the most lavishes parties, filled with only the most prestigious people in town. Gatsby made sure everyone knew his name, and knew that it was his house. Although anyone barely even knew Gatsby, they knew of him. But most would wonder why he had the parties weekend after weekend, but hardly engaged into them himself.
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, tells the story of a man of meager wealth who chases after his dreams, only to find them crumble before him once he finally reaches them. Young James Gatz had always had dreams of being upper class, he didn't only want to have wealth, but he wanted to live the way the wealthy lived. At a young age he ran away from home; on the way he met Dan Cody, a rich sailor who taught him much of what he would later use to give the world an impression that he was wealthy. After becoming a soldier, Gatsby met an upper class girl named Daisy - the two fell in love. When he came back from the war Daisy had grown impatient of waiting for him and married a man named Tom Buchanan. Gatsby now has two coinciding dreams to chase after - wealth and love. Symbols in the story, such as the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the contrast between the East Egg and West Egg, and the death of Myrtle, Gatsby, and Wilson work together to expose a larger theme in the story. Gatsby develops this idea that wealth can bring anything - status, love, and even the past; but what Gatsby doesn't realize is that wealth can only bring so much, and it’s this fatal mistake that leads to the death of his dreams.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a tragic tale of love distorted by obsession. Finding himself in the city of New York, Jay Gatsby is a loyal and devoted man who is willing to cross oceans and build mansions for his one true love. His belief in realistic ideals and his perseverance greatly influence all the decisions he makes and ultimately direct the course of his life. Gatsby has made a total commitment to a dream, and he does not realize that his dream is hollow. Although his intentions are true, he sometimes has a crude way of getting his point across. When he makes his ideals heard, his actions are wasted on a thoughtless and shallow society. Jay Gatsby effectively embodies a romantic idealism that is sustained and destroyed by the intensity of his own dream. It is also Gatsby’s ideals that blind him to reality.
The superficial tag between East Egg and West Egg is the hollowness of the upper class. They put on a façade to show that they are the same and one is not from Wolfsheim’s gang and the other from old money. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby,” the author based the novel on failure and success in the illusional age of materialism. Fitzgerald was inspired by other authors such as Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s style is extremely dense and Fitzgerald wanted simplicity in his writing .Daisy, Gatsby and Tom like everyone have their own problems and they would like to think that they are the only ones with secrets. Nick Carraway gets involved in all these relationships with everyone and never wanted any of it. Tom feels he is the only one that deserves
The Great Gatsby - Chapter 1 Read the beginning of the novel chapter 1 up to page 12 “Tom Buchanan”. in his riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front. porch.” How effective do you find this as an introduction to Great? Gatsby.
“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire” (George Monbiot). In his novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the decay of the American Dream and the corrupt and materialistic tendencies of the American elite. The principal character, Nick, who also serves as narrator, is indecisive but attentive. He lives in West Egg on Long Island Sound, surrounded by immense prosperity and luxurious titles. Gatsby, Nick’s neighbor, is portrayed in an air of mystery and uncertainty, but it is learned that he is a man of around thirty years old who grew up from an impoverished childhood in North Dakota to become exceptionally wealthy. As a military officer in Louisville in 1917, Gatsby met and immediately fell in love with Daisy Buchanan for her aura of elegance and charisma. Throughout his novel, Fitzgerald focuses on Nick’s relationship with Daisy and Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker, and specifically on Gatsby’s unattainable goal of winning Daisy’s love through power and wealth. In the process, an atmosphere of superficiality, discontent and deceitfulness is created through the immoral actions of the primary characters. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby turns the American Dream into a nightmare by revealing issues of unrestrained materialism, moral emptiness, and social hypocrisy during the 1920’s.
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).
In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, a novel set in The Roaring Twenties, portraying a flamboyant and immortal society of the ‘20s where the economy booms, and prohibition leads to organized crimes. Readers follow the journey about a young man named Jay Gatsby, an extravagant mysterious neighbor of the narrator, Nick Carraway. As the novel evolves, Nick narrates his discoveries of Gatsby’s past and his love for Daisy, Nick’s married cousin to readers. Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald develops the theme of the conflict which results from keeping secrets instead of telling the truth using the three characters – Tom Buchanan, Nick Carraway, and Jay Gatsby (James Gats).
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a working class mistress and a wealthy bootlegger pay the ultimate price for having lovers outside of their social structure. The social structures in the novel do not revolve solely around the poor, the working class, and the wealthy. Fitzgerald creates a divide between those inheritably rich and those who have worked for their riches. The symbolism of West Egg and East Egg, two fictional communities located on Long Island, are used to emphasize the strain on romantic relationships between people of varying class structures within the wealthy class.