Mixed Signals

     Reading the Great Gatsby has affected me in ways I could’ve never imagined. I never thought I could hate reading a book but enjoy its analysis. It’s kinda like reading John Steinbeck books— the plot sucks, they talk about some tree for 40 chapters, someone dies, the end. But the analysis of it after, when the real meaning comes through, my perspective completely changes. All of a sudden, I’m not being sent to hell and back trying to get through a single chapter, but actually psychoanalyzing each word on each page of each chapter! — a different form of hell and back. No matter how difficult it has been to keep track of characters and their histories however, when you get it, like truly understanding why even the most seemingly useless lines have been added, it feels wonderful.

East Egg West Egg

            One part of the Great Gatsby was the significance of Daisy’s name. Not only does it represent her, but the cultures around her of the East and West Eggs of Long Island, the old money and new money. To call Daisy a daisy, white and pure on the outside but gold and rich on the inside, reveals how every character in this book not only values their whiteness, but their money, their material worth. Even when describing the sections of Long Island, the focus is on how they got their money. 

Another part of the Great Gatsby that gave me mixed signals was the abuse of women in this book. I was shocked at how causal it was, such as the case with Tom Buchanan. After beating his own wife Daisy, he left the house with some other men to meet his mistress Myrtle Wilson, the woman he is cheating on his wife with, who he also abuses: “Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her [Myrtle Wilson’s] nose with his open hand… Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed,” (Fitzgerald, 37). This normalization of abuse in this social class wasn’t shocking to the time period, but still took me back, because even the way it’s written is so nonchalant. In fact, the way Nick Carraway narrates this whole story sounds very unbiased, like a neutral news report. When he narrates this story, he never uses any adjectives to describe the situation in a way that might lead to bias, he just states it plainly. If he thought this was a horrible event, he may have included that “Tom Buchanan cruellyattacked Myrtle,” or that “the indifferent Mr. McKee turned away from the brutal incident…” Nick does this because he is “inclined to reserve all judgements” (1), which leads readers to trust him as an unbiased narrator. Good for him for earning that reputation, but it’s ironic for him to say that considering he sounds in love with how he describes Gatsby, even going so far as to say that “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” (2). 

Overall, I’m excited to see where this story goes, and even though I started out not liking this book, the deeper, more intricate meaning draws me in to see what story lies beneath the surface of the seemingly boring one being told.