Great Gatsby Chapter One Close Reading Essay Example
The Great Gatsby Chapter One Close Reading
The aim of an exposition in a text is to foreground issues and themes that will be prevalent in the rest of the story. This is evident in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where the first chapter is used to introduce the main characters in the story – Nick, from whose point of view the novel is written, Daisy and Tom Buchanan and Gatsby, whom the novel is named after. It sets the scene and foregrounds the wealth and superficial lifestyle of some through the use of setting, the contrasting natures of the American Dream, with the belief that hard work will get you places in life contrasting with the materialistic and shallow nature of those who have ‘old’ money and do not have to work for a living. Colour is fore grounded as being significant because of its symbolism, for example the green light on the other side of the bay. These conventions work to inform readers of what to expect in the rest of the text and to set the scene in a poetic way using Fitzgerald’s eloquent writing style.
The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, pictures the wasted American Dream as it depicts the 1920s in America. The novel paints a vivid picture of the ‘roaring’ twenties, a time when values of the old generation were being rejected. Skirts became shorter and women cut their hair into bobbed styles; a lifestyle with little moral or religious restraint began to appear. It was a time of extravagance and high living. On the other hand, the 1920s was also a time of extreme loneliness and non-identity as people longed for life as it used to be. The war had promised so much and for many the results were disappointing. The number of cars on the road during this decade went from 9 million up to 26 million and this allowed young people to ‘escape’ from the supervision of their parents, which contributed to a more carefree set of morals. From a modern reader’s perspective, this novel demonstrates the superficiality of the lives of the wealthy, such
The aim of an exposition in a text is to foreground issues and themes that will be prevalent in the rest of the story. This is evident in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where the first chapter is used to introduce the main characters in the story – Nick, from whose point of view the novel is written, Daisy and Tom Buchanan and Gatsby, whom the novel is named after. It sets the scene and foregrounds the wealth and superficial lifestyle of some through the use of setting, the contrasting natures of the American Dream, with the belief that hard work will get you places in life contrasting with the materialistic and shallow nature of those who have ‘old’ money and do not have to work for a living. Colour is fore grounded as being significant because of its symbolism, for example the green light on the other side of the bay. These conventions work to inform readers of what to expect in the rest of the text and to set the scene in a poetic way using Fitzgerald’s eloquent writing style.
The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, pictures the wasted American Dream as it depicts the 1920s in America. The novel paints a vivid picture of the ‘roaring’ twenties, a time when values of the old generation were being rejected. Skirts became shorter and women cut their hair into bobbed styles; a lifestyle with little moral or religious restraint began to appear. It was a time of extravagance and high living. On the other hand, the 1920s was also a time of extreme loneliness and non-identity as people longed for life as it used to be. The war had promised so much and for many the results were disappointing. The number of cars on the road during this decade went from 9 million up to 26 million and this allowed young people to ‘escape’ from the supervision of their parents, which contributed to a more carefree set of morals. From a modern reader’s perspective, this novel demonstrates the superficiality of the lives of the wealthy, such