Category: nick carraway

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The Great Gatsby Lecture

For my lecture last fall on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), I decided to focus on the ways that Fitzgerald’s novel does not speak for all of its readers but also how the novel overtly challenges the myth of the American Dream. This challenging of the myth does not only occur with Gatsby. Rather, it occurs from the very beginning of the … Read More The Great Gatsby Lecture

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Facades in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) challenges the mythology of the American Dream through its multiple layers of the facade that appear throughout the novel. These facades do not merely occur with Gatsby’s house or the rumors surrounding his life. Rather, they appear elsewhere, some even on a meta-level within the text. Today,  I want to briefly discuss a few of these instances. … Read More Facades in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

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The Unattainable Past in Criminal: The Last of the Innocent

Nostalgia powerfully pulls at us, especially as we get older. Deriving from the Greek words nóstos (homecoming) and álgos (pain), nostalgia relates to a longing for the familiar that has passed away. However, the authenticity of that past is not reality. It exists as a mental construction, one that plays up the feelings of youth and innocence while hiding the realities of the past. This … Read More The Unattainable Past in Criminal: The Last of the Innocent

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Exploration and Colonization in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”

At the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Nick Carraway goes over to Gatsby’s dark, empty house then heads down to the beach where he sprawls out on the sand and begins to think about the past, the time before he or Gatsby or Tom and Daisy or anyone else built enormous structures on East Egg and West Egg. He becomes … Read More Exploration and Colonization in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”