Tuesday, November 23, 2010
The Great Gatsby Chapter 1
The Great Gatsby is written in the first person, from the point of view of Nick Carraway. Nick starts the story by telling the audience of a peice of advice his father gave to him in his youth, not to judge or criticise anyone as they have not had the advantages Nick himself has had. Nick says he has taken this advice to heart, and says he now reserves all judgement on other people, when their moral standards do not match up to Nick's own, which he protrays as being very high. He portrays himself as being very tolerant and non-judgemental, but his determination to not judge has caused him to avoid intimate revelations from other people, so he will not be tempted to judge them for their most secret actions. As such it seems Nick was perhaps a bit of a loner at college and in his early life, as he did not want to form an intimate bond with another person for fear of being judgemental. It is important to start the novel with his passage, as it sets up Nick's shy and unitimate personality, and explains his often aloof nature and the reasoning behind it. Despite preaching tolerance Nick appears to perhaps to have let snobbishness in, as he "snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth." While he is tolerant of people with less manners and lower morals due to their poorer background he is also suggesting that people of a lower class than himself can't be of the same moral standard as someone of a higher birth, and is making excuses for some peoples behaviour when all that is to blame for their own malovolence is their own actions, and not the opportunities presented at birth. However Nick recognises the limits of this view, and says that good manners can be founded on hard rock or wet marshes and it doesn't matter where the person has come from, they are still capable of high morals. He said that when he came back from the East he wanted the world to be at a moral attention forever. While this revelas Nick is writing about his experiences in New York the previous summer and autumn, it also revelas that perhaps while in the east Nick experienced some moral shortcomings, and now wishes that despite his earlier views about opportunities at birth, everyone in the world had the same high morals as himself. Nick introduces Gatsby, the titular character, and say that Gatsby was somehow different from anyone else. Despite promising to be non-judgemental Carraway says Gatsby represents everything for which Nick has "unaffected scorn."
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Yes, so is the novel setting us up with a narrator who makes moral judgements or is unable to make them? Does either way affect how the story is told? Watch out for any clues to Nick's moral shortcomings. Keep up this level of enquiry and rememmber to look out for the usual narrative elements.
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