NICK

Cards (10)

  • 'my family have been prominent, well to do people in this middle western city for three generations.' pg8 

    Nick mirrors Americans who fled to the city to take up the opportunity of the booming economy.
    Pre-modifiers of social status and economic stability
    Reference to 'three generations' alludes to survival of WWI, maintenance of wealth.
  • 'as my father snobbishly suggested and i snobbishly repeat, a sense of fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.' pg7 

    Nick mirrors snobbery of Lindner (ARITS)
    Syntactic parallelism - generational attitude of snobbery + irony in critical self-awareness of elitism
    Juxtaposition of phrase 'fundamental... unequally' = inequality
    Metaphoric 'parcelled out' suggests morals are finite
    Underlies the novels theme of class behaviours + elitism in the dislike of transgression
  • 'casual watcher in the darkening streets , and i was him too, looking up and wondering. i was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life'. 

    Voyeurism - ambivalent position in society both 'within and without'
    Supernatural semantic field in juxtaposing ('enchanted', 'repelled') highlighting N's conflicting feelings about New York elite
    Personification 'inexhaustible variety' ever changing life
  • ''they're a rotten crowd' i shouted across the lawn. 'your worth the whole damn bunch put together.'' pg146 

    Lust / obsession of the hyperbole of G's worth
    Colloquial language of 'rotten crowd' and 'damn bunch' connote decay, foul, and moral corruption
    Irony
  • 'i was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. people were not invited... i had actually been invited.' pg43

    Egotism.
    Social fragmentation of the 1920s.
  • Nick is an intradiegetic narrator.
  • He narrates the stories of the others lives but at the same time positions himself within them. Nevertheless, he never admits to being the instigator of any action in the novel - it is the other characters who decide things, who destroy things.
    He is an unreliable narrator, not as 'honest' as he sets himself up as.
  • 'as we walked back... through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.' chp9
  • 'yes. you know what i think of you'

    Nick refusal to shake Toms hand in short minor sentence reflects the confrontational, dismissive tone
  • 'i came back restless... the middle west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe - so i decided to go east and learn the bond business.' pg9

    Privileged experience of change in comparison to Mama, who moved due to racism
    Hyperbole