Great Gatsby Paper (How to Read Like a Professor)

Autumn Kills Seasons have had control over the way people have been living since the beginning of time, and because of that, seasons have dominance over a novel that often goes unnoticed; by creating an atmosphere that readers can relate to. All seasons have certain aspects of life associated with them Thomas C. Foster writes about this in his book How to Read Like a Professor: For about as long as anyone’s been writing anything, the seasons have stood for the same set of meanings. Maybe it's hard-wired into us that spring has to do with childhood and youth, summer with adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion, autumn with decline and middle age and tiredness but also harvest, winter with old age and resentment and death. (178)
As a result of this, when someone reads the line, "I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer” (8) from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, they realize that it will be filled with the stories of “adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion.” Seasons present significance in works of literature because they instill themselves in the reader’s emotions, affect the story’s plot, and produce a symbolic meaning. Authors use seasons to stir the emotions of the reader, who more often than not will have memories tied to each season in particular. Foster recounts some of the points made in Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”, when he writes, “We know something more is afoot than simply school being out. In fact, our responses are so deeply ingrained that seasonal associations are among the easiest for the writer to upend and use ironically.” (183) Although Fitzgerald does not take advantage of the ironic spin mentioned by Foster, he does understand the feelings that are associated with the seasons; when he writes about the love story of Jay and Daisy, as the seasons change the characters do as well. In this story Jay and Daisy fall in love during the autumn of 1917, later in autumn