Gatsby and Innocence quotes Flashcards
Tradition
“What was or was not ‘the thing’ played a part as important in Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers’
‘In reality they all lived in a king of hieroglyphic world’
‘Daisy gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor’ (Gatsby’s perception)
First World War
‘The words had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil atmosphere of the Archer dining room’ (N saying E should divorce)
‘but always with indiscernible barbed wire between’ (Gatsby trying to mingle with people of Daisy’s class)
Power imbalance
‘a thrill of possesorship’
‘That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool’
Conformism
‘You mustn’t think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine’
‘The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff’
Lack of agency
‘Saw the dwindling figure of a man whom nothing was ever to happen’
‘When he saw us a gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes’
‘He was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life’ - elaborate & futile
(late to work amd no one gaf)
Wilson’s life is futile and not elaborate
Social suppression of women (divorce)
‘But my freedom - is that nothing?’
Europe and America
Ellen - ‘It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country’
New Money
‘What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too - didn’t cut the pages’
‘The scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound’
‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such - such beautiful shirts’
‘The new people that New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to’
Ned Winsett
‘You’re a pitiful little minority. You’ve got no centre, no competition, no audience’
M. Riviere
‘Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty’
‘utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could offer’ (lacks Nativism)
‘I thought it your metropolis’
Experience
Ellen -> Newland
‘I’ve had to look at the gorgon’
‘You’ve never been beyond, and I have’
May
‘He had ceased to provide her with opinions and she had began to hazard her own, with results destructive’
‘Had died thinking the world a good place’
T.J. Eckleburg
‘God sees everything’ (W)
M ‘That’s an advertisement’
Gatby’s father
‘He’d have been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d have built up the country’
Insanely rich financier and railway director that built up America
Gatsby
‘can’t repeat the past? he cried incredulously, why of course you can!’
Nick - TGG
‘I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade’
Jordan
I met another bad driver, didn’t I?
I thought you were rather an honest straightforward person
Make such a wrong guess
Final chapter
‘And as I sat brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock’
‘For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor deserved’
Gatsby’s love = colonisation, old dream
“Americans, while willing… To be serfs, have always been obstinate about peasantry” 
Alex Liberto, 2021
‘Both authors emphasize the grandeur of past civilizations, in Europe and in America, to contrast the squalor of modern life. Nick tells Gatsby, “You can’t repeat the past,” Gatsby replies, “Why of course you can.” Gatsby’s belief that he is able to repeat the past simply substantiates his disconnect from reality. Gatsby’s house is often compared to that of a feudal lord. His foreign clothes, antiques, and furnishings all suggest a nostalgia for the British aristocratic lifestyle. This dream of returning to a glorious past, however, results in a superficial imitation of the old European social system that America had left behind.’
