"The riotous excursions" are rebuffed, in place of the longing for an older, more humane America. The use of the militaristic lexis "uniform" disapprovingly aligns the war with the crass attitudes typical of New York, a key theme featuring in his earlier work "Tales of the Jazz Age". Nick's journey eastwards shows him the carelessness of the wealthy whether it be the squalid carelessness of the Buchanans or the unrealistic splendour of Gatsby. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart." Moreover, Nick exhibits misanthropic notions, suggesting that he is influenced by the moral vacuum that Fitzgerald perceived to have engulfed American traditions: His retreat into nostalgia is indicative of Fitzgerald's own Modernist notions that the linear decline of American society corresponds with the quest for material wealth and the resulting spiritual poverty, prevalent in the "Jazz Age". He is therefore a dichotomous figure his hindsight lends him an aphoristic wisdom that indicates he is unable to fully assimilate the reality of his surroundings: "life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all". Yet Nick's Adamic sentiments are offset by the acknowledgement of his partial corruption by the East demonstrating a hardy cynicism. A Marxist critic would recognise the voracious malevolent force of Capitalism, which removes the agrarian idyll of the Midwest as "warm centre of the world". Nick's supposition that the bond business "could support one more single man" posits his antediluvian mentality. At the start of the novel, his gestures and judgements mark him as a character of moral integrity he states that he is "full of interior rules that act as brakes". Nick serves as the novels' source of moral guidance. "Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe-so I decided to go East and learn the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man" Nick appears fretful at the moral confinements of the post-war Midwest: Both novels begin with a young narrator, who out of a mood of aimlessness and wonderment, embarks on a journey in which fundamental truths of the human condition are learnt. The narrative scheme of The Great Gatsby contains many parallels with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Nick successfully engages the sympathies of the reader, preventing any single preconceptions. His narration reflects his moral status aiming to maintain a rescued fragment of events and reliability. Nick Carraway's moral evolution is thematically pertinent to the plot progression of "The Great Gatsby".
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |