That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of the holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” To claim that “this has been a story of the West” after everything we’ve seen is unexpected way of summing up the novel. But let’s go with Nick for a moment. Write a long paragraph in support of this idea and include five moments in the novel that help make your case. Use actual quotes from the text. Finally, having done that, explain what Nick means in referring to a possible “deficiency” he shares with Tom, Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan. Nick anecdotally describes both his origins in the West and his brief experience in the East, glorifying the West as a family-centric, moral, old-world paradise, opposed to the East, with its grotesquerie and …show more content…
When Gatsby states that “of course [he] can” repeat the past (pg. 110), he is only setting himself up for disaster. While he was once able to bring forth his dreams into reality, he soon sees that his “dead dream [was]…trying to touch what was no longer tangible.” (pg. 134) His dream was quite obviously dead, and Gatsby had lost that once-empowering superpower, because the modernization of the East is far different from the Western