Nick Carraway Flashcards
“Remember all the people who haven’t had the advantage you have.”
[CH1] ALLUSION to his status as a rich, white man. Class consciousness and respectability.
“Inclined to reserve all judgements”
[CH1] LEXICAL CHOICE OF ‘inclined’ makes it sound like a responsibility rather than free choice. Throughout the novel, we can see him ditch this when he is around Gatsby/other wealthy people who gossip
“I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.” “Came back restless”
[CH1] Time in the war, The Lost Generation. ‘unknown’ as a LEXICAL CHOICE creates ambiguity within the text
“Feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realised by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon”
[CH1] Foreshadow novel, TRIPLET — lost Generation.
“Bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new moments from the mint, promising to unfold shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew.”
[CH1] TRIPLET, POLYSYNDETIC LISTING, MYTHOLOGY ALLUSION - idea of ‘reinventing himself’ despite already coming from wealth. Listing show these books may be excessive and highlights Nick’s consumerism
“Higher over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in darkening streets, and I was him too[…]”
[CH2] NARRATION, SOCIAL CLASS, SPLIT PERSPECTIVE - Nick is both the higher and lower class, maybe he tries to exaggerate his ability to empathise. Maybe doesn’t feel a belonging within his social class. Fitzgerald relation?
“I am one of the few honest people I have known”
[CH3] DECLARATION. We often question this throughout the novel as he often struggles to admit his opinion of people towards them.
“Unlike Tom Buchanan and Gatsby, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms.”
[CH4] COMPARITIVE, LEXICAL CHOICE OF DISEMBODIED. Nick in his 30’s as a single man. Love depicted as something which only causes problems - Daisy/Tom/Gatsby
“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs (agricultural workers) have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
[CH5], TONE OF ANTI-PATRIONISM — hypocrisy within society, social class; perhaps he is criticising those who think they’re above peasantry. Disconnected opinion, as he’s aristocracy. American Dream
“Thirty - the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, of thinning hair.”
[CH7] ANAPHORA, FIGURATIVE — he is moving out of his 20s (1920s), may reflect the transition from depravity towards finding himself. Lost generation
“So we drive on towards death through the cooling twilight.”
[CH7] FORESHADOW, ‘cooling’ = transition from summer to Autumn, decay. Driving - they are doing this to themselves.
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re better than the whole damn bunch put together.”
[CH8], TABOO LANGUAGE, GENERALISING. Nick, at this point, cannot see any redeemable qualities of East-Egg aristocracy.
“That’s my middle west - not the wheat of the prairies or the lost swede towns, but the thrilling returning of trains of my youth.”
[CH10] LISTING - theme of automobiles and industrialisation associated with youth. Contrasts the innocence of William Blake.
“Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn”
[CH1] LEXICAL CHOICE, unaffected - denotes his bias towards Gatsby despite his crimes.
“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform, and at a sort of moral attention forever”
PAST TENSE, ‘moral uniform’ allusion to war? Lost Generation, corruption of power in aristocracy etc.
“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and I felt it in others - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the moist poignant moments of night and life.”
NARRATION, LEXICAL CHOICE. Empathetic narrator, views other perspectives yet he never considers what’s happening with the other characters on a deeper, intellectual level.
“After Gatsby’s death the cast was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes.”
DISTORTION, only after Gatsby’s death he realises it - epiphany.
