The Great Gatsby chapter 1 notes
- Created by: Romero-montague
- Created on: 16-02-20 16:25
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What happens?
- Nick Carraway describes where he is living and how he got there. He is invited to see his first cousin once removed (Daisy Buchanan), there he meets Jordan Baker. He discovers that Daisy's husband (Tom) is having an affair with a woman (later known as Myrtle). Jordan mentions the name of Nick's neighbor and when he gets home, Nick sees Gatsby staring at the green light at the end of his dock.
- There is tension between the admiration of wealth and the importance of morality
- Fitzgerald uses the words "hope" and "dream" and mentions them indirectly- put the story together in a way and illustrate ideas
Nick is an observer- both narrator and participant
- "reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope" and "I am inclined to reserve all judgements"- still learning how to not judge anything and will continue to throughout his life, acknowleges how difficult it is to keep all judgements to yourself
- "Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the same advantages that you've had"- Nick was born into a wealthy family (have been important for 3 generations), survived WW1, descended from "the Dukes of Buccleuch", have a sucessful hardware bussiness, "graduated from New Haven", recieved a college education, wrote "solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale news", was able to "learn the bond bussiness", his father funded him for a year, he was able to afford lots of books, was able to afford to move from the Middle West to the East, could afford to rent a bungalow outside New York for $80 a month, his house is "a small eyesore", he got a dog and a "finnish woman", he has a car "I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans", he can afford to travel "I spent two days in chicago"
- "The world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever"- doesn't like change
- "after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit"- Nick feels human (unlike Gatsby), makes him seem less like the omnipotent narrator
- "the well-rounded man"- well rounded, plays the role of observer and participant
- "Unusually communicative in a reserved way"- feels as if he is observing himself
- "privilidged glimpses into the human heart" and "life is much more sucessfully looked at from a single window, after all"- shows that Nick is an observer
- "In my younger and more vunerable years"- infer that Nick is in middle adulthood (25-30)
- "recently arrived", "it was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. How do you get to West Egg village? he asked helplessly" and "an origional settler"- Nick could be called a fraud because he isn't an "origional settler" or helpful as he makes the effort to help someone despite how new he is to the place
- Nick could be projecting his insecurites/jelousy…
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