Great Gatsby Response

Part Four: Reader Response I selected to read The Great Gatsby because I have heard so many great things about it. It is the great American novel, which made me gravitate toward it. Nick Carraway, the main character, tells this story, and it starts off with him reminiscing on how he moved to New York City in 1922 to become a bondsman. There are two “egg” islands in his location: the East Egg, the one of old money, and the West Egg, the one of new money. Nick lives on West Egg, but he visits his cousin, Daisy, and her husband, Tom, on East Egg. When he has dinner with them, he discovers from Daisy’s friend, Jordan Baker, that Tom is having an affair, and she also tells him that Gatsby, his next-door neighbor, throws marvelous parties. Nick

Her marital status with Tom poses a problem for him as well, for it would be difficult for them to be in a serious relationship. A plot twist occurs in this story when the reader discovers that Jay Gatsby’s real name is James Gatz, and his family was comprised of dirt poor farmers. The setting of the story remains in New York City and Long Island where all of the wealthy reside. The mood of the story is dark and pessimistic, such as when Nick describes the awful people of the party. This mood is displayed when he says, “Thirty- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair,” (page 71). The language in the book is eloquent and it uses terms from the twenties, such as rotogravure, to describe things. For the most part, following along with events in the novel is fairly easy, but some passages can be hard to understand. The theme that is starting to surface is that greed and longing for the past are both negative desires in life. This is shown by how Nick displays distaste for those who lust after material pleasures and through Gatsby’s unhealthy obsession with wanting to remain in the past. Meyer Wolfshiem, a gambler who fixed the World Series and a friend of Gatsby’s, is introduced in the middle chapters of this