The Great Gatsby and Brooklyn General Vision and Viewpoint
By Alannah Jennings 5CS
a). Significant events in texts and the impact they have on readers often help to clarify the general vision and viewpoint of those texts.” With reference to two texts on your comparative course, compare the ways in which at least 3 significant moments in each text, and its impact on you, helped to clarify the general vision and viewpoint of these texts.
I agree that significant events in texts and the impact they have on readers often help to clarify the general vision and viewpoint of those texts. The texts that I have chosen to that have very important key moments that highlight the general vision and viewpoint are the novel “The Great Gatsby” by Scott Fitzgerald and “Brooklyn” directed by John Crowley.
Throughout the novel “The Great Gatsby”, Scott Fitzgerald helps to explore the general vision and viewpoint by creating an image of the American dream. This is especially highlighted in the key moments from the novel. Fitzgerald shows the pessimistic side of the wealth in North America and the carelessness of the people at the top of it all. The “Great Gatsby” is set in the roaring 1920s at the height of prohibition when alcohol was illegal just after World War I. At the start of the novel the characters in the novel have a very elegant lifestyle and drink all day long. The novel although mostly set in the Eggs is also set in “The “Valley of “Ashes” which plays a big part in joining the worlds of West Egg and East Egg and Manhattan. The industrialised valley of the ashes symbolises a very different America that shows poverty and hopelessness. This hopelessness is later seen at the end of the novel through a very dramatic moment and can be compared with the start of “Brooklyn” as the setting at the start of the film also shows hopelessness and no way out of that way of life.
The first key moment that clarifies the general vision and viewpoint in the “Great Gatsby”, is when Nick Caraway describes his neighbour Jay Gatsby’s mansion for the first time. The first line he says is “I lived at West Egg, the well less fashionable of the two”. The “well” gives me an image of how Nick will narrate the story throughout the course of the novel. The “well” also suggests he is uncertain of his surroundings and is sceptical as he has been thrown into this world of wealth. It also shows how he still does not know to describe Jay Gatsby at the end of the novel. He says that his own house is “squeezed” between two “huge places” that rent for 12,000 a season. This represents Nick himself being squeezed between two different visions of the world; The world of Gatsby and the world of Daisy and Tom. When Nick describes the mansion he describes it as an “imitation” of the Hotel de Ville in Normandy. He says that it is “spanking new” and has a “beard of ivy” on one side of it. This suggests that the owner of the house is pretending that the mansion is old. It also has a marble swimm...
