Wednesday, July 25, 2012

The Great Gatsby (Pages 1-10)


The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald


Life is like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Each person becomes their own narrator determining the plot and words on every page. Like looking through a magnifying glass, the narration of each life becomes a novel with a story and plot visible through the heightened image presented.

 “This isn’t just an epigram-life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all (Fitzgerald, Page 4).” In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, the reader looks through the  single window of Nick Carraway’s perspective as the novel takes a first person narrative point of view with limited omniscience. This becomes an influential and crucial part of the novel as the reader sees everything from Nick’s objective yet open standpoint and opinion of events. From the introduction of each character, their descriptions and qualities, and opinions of events, the story becomes directed by the management of Nick, his reserved judgment, his opinion of these past happenings, and his curiosity about 1920s society. It is his character the reader becomes attached to as the reader looks through Nick’s eyes out of the single window of his perspective.  In just the first several pages of the novel, the reader analyzes everything from Nick’s objective and honest view as Nick becomes Fitzgerald’s voice and the reader’s eyes.

From a single view and through a single window, the reader focuses on a single story. As told from the first person point of view, The Great Gatsby invites the reader into Nick Caraway’s past as through a looking glass. Thus, it becomes a story of the beginning, middle, and end of the lives that pass by the window. 

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