Notesale: Turn your study into money

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The Great Gatsby Notes – Nick Carraway
Comprehensive close reading notes
Important to note that this is written after his experience so he is speaking about how he is
now after his journey of change would be complete
...
’
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This passage has four significant parts and one overarching theme
...
’

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The opening paragraph foreshadows the last, uses a circular narrative style

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Fitzgerald could be using a chiastic structure/palistrophe

‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, ‘he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this
world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had
...


1

Nick is giving the reading his point of view as a telepathic relationship with his father, but
could he just be interpreting things the way he wants to? The advice is like that of a
philanthropist, like John D
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’

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Rockefeller was reserved, had an under-inflated ego, had a purpose beyond wealth
and was frugal
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Nick appears to infer that reserving judgment is pointless as his thoughts will proved
right eventually

I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth
...

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He now contradicts his earlier statement is manner that suggest the reading audience
should understand him
2

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
...

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Nick despises the American dream, upstarts, libertines, honesty without
euphemisms, showiness
...
Just like tom with Myrtle

If personality is an unbroken series of gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him
...

Wholesale hardware business
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Wholesale means they supplied businesses

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During a boom period

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No mention that he got a scholarship to Yale

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He has a rich cousin and many connections

I Graduated from New Haven in 1915
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New Haven is Yale and it is in Long Island
...

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Nick loves conflict which why he does not exert more effort to stop Tom’s and
Daisy’s affairs

Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed now seemed like the
ragged edge of the universe
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He yearns for the more modern world away from traditions and values associated
with his class
...
He has tasted the big city and wants more

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A bit like Gatsby Nick is chasing after an old memory from years before

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Tom, Nick and Gatsby are all about 30 years old

Everyone I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man
...

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He has a maid, an expensive house and an expensive used car

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He assumes his maid is muttering wisdom, who she could in fact be complaining
about life as we later learn she lives in poverty
4

I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler
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P Morgan, who died in 1913, would have been in recent memory

I was very literary in college
...

On the contrary, he appears to show deference it

Arrogant eyes
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’
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He is transferring his feelings to Tom’s thoughts

We were never intimate
...

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Nick understands things clearly
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As though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil
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Nick understands you cannot help some people and you have to leave them to their
own folly

25

Chapter 8
You ought to go away
He wouldn’t consider it
...
He
was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free
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He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do
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Still an opportunity to relieve him, but still allowing him to have hope

I suppose so
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He knows Daisy will not call but will not tell him this

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn
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”
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Does he exclude himself from ‘them’?

I’ve always been glad I said that
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He still expresses disapproval

26

Chapter 9
After two years
“Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me
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I can’t go through
this alone
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Moving on with life

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Accept life as is

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I,
were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly
unadaptable to Eastern life
...
Adler
would say the actions were committed because you wanted to and are using
something else as an excuse
...
I thought you were rather an
honest, straightforward person
...

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She saying they are both liars and not a stable person to rely on

“I’m thirty,” I said
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”
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Finally, being honest with self

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I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified
...
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up
things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever
it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…
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See the reality of the power that some have despises it

Rid of my provincial squeamishness forever
So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past

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