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Language In The Great Gatsby

Decent Essays

Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby has kept the status of an icon for many years since its publication, as Kenneth Eble notes: “There is every reason to believe that for many undergraduates in American colleges and universities The Great Gatsby is the great American novel.” (Eble 34) As such “American novel”, on this work, I will briefly discuss an aspect of The Great Gatsby that I find little discussed: the usage of language to provoke sensations and the constant nostalgia in the overtone of the whole narration, as well as the mythological creation of Gatsby as part of Nick’s devices as a narrator.
Part I: Nick’s Narrative: the romanticism in the language, the sensation in the words.
Our starting point is that there is a romantic usage …show more content…

Imprisoned in his present, Gatsby belongs even more to the past than to the future.” (Bewley, 239) What Gatsby supposed Daisy to be, what the American dream was meant to be, is nothing alike to what the reality is now. Gatsby creates his own mythological time, absent of essence, an everlasting memory that feeds his will, an incorruptible imagination that focus in another time different from the factual moment of the novel: “Throughout the novel, then, the concept of time is distended –a reflection of Gatsby’s personal obsession with Daisy as well as an indication of his ability to remain at the center of the narrative –until the entire Long Island summer seems somehow part of an adolescent’s fantasy…” (Magistrale –Dickerson, 121) The entire sensation of Gatsby’s story through Nick’s recreation is that of a long gone past, and the effort of the language relies in trying to recreate such past as magnificent as Gatsby’s dream was. In other words, Nick tries to stand true to Gatsby’s dream by immortalizing his vision of the world by the romantic use of language for his narration, as a homage to a gone dream. “In a manner resembling Bakhtin’s description of the polyphonic …show more content…

The American dream is Gatsby’s dream, a gone hope of something that could have been but that in fact, never was. “We recognize that the great achievement of the novel is that it manages, while poetically evoking a sense of the goodness of that early dream, to offer the most damaging criticism of it in American literature.” (Bewley, 245). Gatsby’s naïve vision is contrasted by the reality of what Daisy is, of how America has turned to be something completely away from the illusion we expected it to be: “As such, it led inevitably toward the problem that has always confronted American artists dealing with the American experience –the problem of determining the hidden boundary in the American vision of life at which the reality ends and the illusion begins.” (Bewley,

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