Dichotomy In The Great Gatsby

Romagnolo fixes her ideas of a false dichotomy by acknowledging the complexity and interconnectivity within two main types in her 2011 paper Initiating Dialogue: Narrative Beginnings in Multicultural Narratives. In it she states, “Although several critics have established the importance of beginnings, they have yet to excavate the links between the ways narratives begin (formal beginnings) and the ways they address the concept of beginning (conceptual beginnings)” (Romagnolo, 183). It seems that since her 2003 paper, she has recognized the spectrum in which narrative beginnings operate, not just falling in one of two places, but sometimes belonging to both, neither, or an undefined category. If more critics were to acknowledge this, I think

When a story’s protagonist travels to the known or familiar world to the “supernatural” or unfamiliar world in which the bulk of the narrative will unfold. This change of setting is important because it is the known or familiar world which grounds the story for the reader, and makes the events of the narrative tangible for them to understand. If one were to begin a text after the hero has left the known world behind, the text would seem confusing and difficult to navigate. In The Great Gatsby, the end of the beginning comes when Nick Carraway crosses into the unfamiliar world of Gatsby’s party. While he is knowledgeable about how to navigate the ways of life of old-monied people, such as with the Buchanan’s, he is thrown off about how to behave and interact in the new-monied world Gatsby created at his mansion. Following the hero’s journey, Nick spends the majority of the novel trying to figure out how to navigate the new money world until all of Gatsby’s money, and the glory of his mansion, are taken away upon his death, thus returning him to the familiar world of the middle class and occasionally old-monied