Response To The Great Gatsby

“Material Without Being Real” Essay Response
The essay we read confused me, I didn’t get what photographs and pictorialists had to do with The Great Gatsby. I didn’t see the relevance of their views. Pictures may have small things to do with The Great Gatsby, but I don’t think there was enough to ramble on and on for nine pages. I feel as though by the end of the essay they weren’t even talking about The Great Gatsby at all, but photos and how they show the unseen. There were parts of the essay that did stick out to me. One that really made me think was, “appearances are not just deceiving: they are predetermined by prior appearances.” I don’t think they mean actually appearances necessarily, as more of the appearance of a person you’ve
had a prior experience with. For instance; if you know someone with multiple tattoos and they don’t really care about much of anything and are loud and obnoxious, you will probably feel that way about most other people with tattoos. But it you know someone who is really intelligent and has multiple tattoos you might think that others with tattoos are smart as well, when they could be as dumb as a doornail. This could possibly be why older people have a hard time accepting young people with tattoos, because in their past they’ve had a bad experience with someone who had tattoos. So when the author says “prior appearances” I think what they’re getting at is that it’s not really the appearance but the appearance of a person in a prior experience. In the essay the author questions if “we ever see Gatsby at all”. This sentence made me rethink the whole story. It made me wonder if the story was about Nick or Gatsby. In the book we learn about Gatsby but we don’t know him. Through Nick’s narration of the story we learn about him and eventually know him. In most foreign languages there is two forms of the word know. There is to know someone, like how we know celebrities, and there’s to know someone, like how you know your mother. In the story we know (celebrities) Gatsby but we know (mother) Nick. When you actually know someone you know how they will react to certain things, you know when to say certain things based on their facial expressions, and you know when to just be quiet and listen because you can tell they’ve had a bad day. Throughout the whole book we learn less about Gatsby than Nick through his narration. We learn facts about Gatsby, but knowing facts about someone doesn’t mean you know them. The last part of the essay that really made me go “ahhhh...” was when the author said, “Janus-faced Nick is able to criticize the American dream while embracing it...” I had to look up what the word “janus” ment and in my dictionary it said; two-faced or hypocritical, this definition is not what I thought Nick to be.
I thought Nick was someone who was the same all the time, around any group of people. So this little phrase really made me think. Nick lives on West Egg, which is the poorer of the two Eggs, but he hangs out with the rich guys, such as Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby. Sometimes while reading the book I got the feeling that Nick was criticizing the richer people, like how Gatsby has parties all the time, he criticized their actions and their shallowness, but at the same time he was being shallow because he was criticizing them and hanging out with them on a regular basis. I just wonder why he would hang out with the richer folk when he criticizes them and thinks that they believe they’re better than everyone else? That doesn’t make sense, hang out with people who you don’t have to change for and you don’t think are lame. The way he talks of them when he’s narrating is different than the way he interacts with
them.
This essay had multiple good points in it, but I still don’t understand why photos have anything to do with the book. The idea the author was trying to get across wasn’t clicking in my head.