The Great Gatsby Chapter 1 Analysis

1. Nick is young man from Minnesota. He moved to New York in the late spring. He gets a house in the West Egg region of Long Island populated by the new rich. His nearby neighbor in West Egg is a secretive man named Gatsby, who lives in an rich Gothic manor and has extravagant gatherings each Saturday night. Nick is not at all like other occupants of West Egg. He was instructed at Yale and has social associations in East Egg, a stylish territory of Long Island home to the set up high society. The most crucial part is the meeting of Gatsby.

2. In Chapter one, there is an inconsistency in Nick's perspective. Despite the fact that he sees himself as tolerant and nonjudgmental, he additionally sees himself as ethically advantaged, having a superior feeling of responsibilities than most others. Nick has a negative response to his encounters in New York and in the long run comes back to the Midwest looking for a less ethically vague living conditions. Gatsby unmistakably represents a test to Nick's standard of methods for contemplating the world, and Nick's battle is to understand that.

It is a valley of ashes, a place of uninterrupted desolation. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are an indelibly grotesque image. These are eyes unattached to any face or body, gazing out over a wasteland. Fitzgerald's description of the drawbridge and passing barges makes an allusion to a mythological river which one crosses to enter the realm of the dead. Like the scene in which Gatsby reaches for the green light, high symbolism is given priority over the demands of realism. The novel's only non-wealthy characters live in the valley of ashes; it is the grim underside to the hedonism of the Eggs, and of New York City. George Wilson, Myrtle's dejected husband, seems almost made of ashes: "ashen dust" coats his clothes and his hair. Fitzgerald represents poverty as lying beneath wealth and providing the wealthy with a dumping ground. It is what the wealthy wish to avoid seeing at all