The Technique In The Great Gat essays

The Technique In The Great Gat essays The Great Gatsby is Fitzgeralds finest novel, it was published in1925, and Eliot considered it to be the first step that America has taken since Henry James1. It is a sensitive and symbolic treatment of themes of contemporary life related with irony and pathos to the legendry of American dream. Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner who sells bonds in New York, lives at West Egg, Long Islands, which is separated from the city by an ashdump, whose distinctive feature is an oculists faded billboard with a pair of great staring eyes behind yellow spectacles, symbolic of an obscenely futile world. Nicks neighbor is mysterious Jay Gatsby, whose mansion and fabulous entertainments are financed by bootlegging and other criminal activities. As a poor army lieutenant, Gatsby had fallen in love with Nicks cousin Daisy, who later married Tom Buchanan, an unintelligent, brutal man of wealth. Through Nick, he manages to meet Daisy again, impresses her by his extravagant devotion, and makes her his mistress. Her husband takes as his mistress Myrtle Wilson, sensual wife of a garage man. When her husband becomes jealous and imprisons her in her room, Myrtle escapes, runs out on the highway, and is accidentally hit by Daisy, who drives on. Gatsby tries to protect Daisy, and Tom, to whom she h as become reconciled, brings his hatred of her lover to a climax by telling Myrtles husband that it was Gatsby who killed her. Wilson shoots Gatsby and then himself. At the end of the story, Nick leaves the East and returns to the Mid-west. The Great Gatsby is the subject of many and diverse critical assessments and reappraisals that have elevated the novel to its current prominent position in American literature2. In this novel, Fitzgerald used many techniques: the controlled and detached point of view, the crafted structure and symbolism, all these distinguish The Great Gatsby from the style of h...