RR-The Great Gatsby

Jane Zeman 811 9/18/13

Reading Response - The Great Gatsby

           The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is about social class, love, and death. Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a middle-class man who lives in a small house on the West Egg of Long Island, N.Y. There is a mansion next to his house. The owner of that house is Jay Gatsby. At first, Carraway thinks that Gatsby is just another self-absorbed rich man, but he doesn’t really know anything about him. Towards the middle of the story as he grows closer to Gatsby, his history and true feelings start to become clear. By the end of the book Carraway knows all about him and sees him for what he really is.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator doesn’t know much about Gatsby, but assumes the worst. He narrates, “…Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.” He means that he doesn’t respect Gatsby, because he is rich. He says, “‘Who is he?’ I demanded. ‘Do you know?’ ‘He’s just a man named Gatsby.’ [She said] ‘Where’s he from I mean? And what does he do?’” Gatsby is very mysterious and aloof. Also, Carraway first meets Gatsby at a party in which none of the guests have ever met him or know anything about him. Carraway starts off without knowing anything about the man who will soon be his close friend.

          About half way through the book Carraway’s primary assumptions are gone and he is starting to learn who Gatsby really is. His friend Jordan knows more about it than he does and tells him about why Gatsby bought a place on Long Island, “‘It was a strange coincidence,’ I said. ‘But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.’ [said Jordan] ‘Why not?’ ‘Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.’…He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.” This means that before, Gatsby was meaningless in Carraway’s eyes, but now he sees that Gatsby was motivated by love to move to Long Island. Another example of him learning more about Gatsby is, “‘…I’ve been in several things,’ he corrected himself. ‘I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I’m not in either one now.’”Gatsby is telling him how he made his money. Carraway thought that he had inherited all his money, but that is not where it came from.

          In the end, Carraway is fully informed and understands why and how Gatsby did the things that he did. For example, “I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from the same stratum as herself – that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities – he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.” These are Carraway’s own ideas and beliefs about how Gatsby did what he did. Also the author writes, “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself, perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly he could find out what the thing was…” Carrraway is very good at reading into Gatsby’s thoughts and emotions.

In conclusion, Gatsby started out kind of mysterious, but Carraway was able to figure him out by the end. The information about Gatsby slowly trickled in from various sources throughout the course of the story. Gatsby seemed to be shallow and egotistical, judging from his house and his parties, but he turned out to be much more interesting than that. He was able to convince and manipulate Daisy into thinking she was safe and used Carraway to get to Daisy, but in the end he still thought he was a good man.