Examples Of Nostalgia In The Great Gatsby

Bygone Longing

“The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”- Milan Kundera. Restorative nostalgia is seen in The Great Gatsby when Gatsby goes to the end of his pier every night looking into the green light cherishing his love for Daisy and in Never Let Me Go when Kathy goes back to Norfolk at the very end of the book after Ruth and Tommy have died. Gatsby and Kathy are both characters who feel an abundance of loneliness and feel the need to escape their reality through nostalgia. Gatsby from The Great Gatsby and Kathy from Never Let Me Go both use restorative nostalgia as reference to Svetlana Boym’s Future of Nostalgia to create a sense of home

As Boym states in her Future of Nostalgia, Restorative nostalgia is the attempt to reconstruct a lost home but it does not think of itself as notalgia, but of truth and tradition (Boym, 18). In Never Let Me Go Kathy and the other clones never really had a sense of home or security. Hailsham was basically a group home with strict rules and an extreme lack of love. All throughout Kathy’s life she’s just gone to wherever the clones were supposed to go at that point in their lives. She had everything laid out for her and never had an opportunity to create a home for herself so she created one through nostalgia. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby left his hometown as soon as possible to join the military and he never looked back, he didn’t like who or where he came from and aspired to create a new life for himself. After he got out of

In both The Great Gatsby and Never Let Me Go Kathy and Gatsby feel a great sense of loneliness and isolation so they use restorative nostalgia to make their lives feel meaningful and full of love. Kathy has never experienced a lot of love in her life and to cope with that she uses nostalgia in many different ways, similar to Gatsby who has loved and lost and needs to keep that love alive through nostalgia. In Silvia Bizzini’s Recollecting Memories, Reconstructing Identities: Narrators as Storytellers in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go she says, “alienation from parental relations becomes an additional issue that overlaps others such as nostalgia and personal displacement in the construction of narratives of collective trauma in Ishiguro’s two most recent novels''(Bizzini, 67). It is shown in many places throughout both novels that the lack of love they’ve experienced and in Kathy’s case parental relations had a large effect on them overall throughout their lives. One of the main reasons for their nostalgia is to try and hold on to a sense of love and care they’ve never experienced. When Kathy was younger the only maternal figures she really ever had were the guardians, and in all honesty their jobs weren’t to mother so they didn’t. She reminisces on those moments at Hailsham because she never really received much love after that. Gatsby had parents but when he lost