PART ONE INTRODUCING THE GREAT GATSBY INTRODUCING THE GREAT GATSBY PART ONE

STUDY FOCUS: KEY ISSUES LOCATIONS IN THE NOVEL Key issues of The Great Gatsby are:  The character and fate of Jay Gatsby as a refl ection of the character and fate of America  The relationship between the New World (America) and the Old World (Europe)  The relationship between the present and the past  The loss of innocence and the capacity to feel wonder  The reliability of Nick as a narrator  The relationship between point of view and truth, or between belief and understanding  The nature of memory  The worth of Daisy as the object of Gatsby’s love  The value of hope and dreams in an age of cynicism and materialism  The value of writing. Keep these ideas in mind as you read through the novel. You may be examined on one or a combination of these important issues.

SETTING

The action of The Great Gatsby takes place in , the major city on America’s East coast. Nick Carraway works in the fi nancial district, centred on Wall Street, in the Lower district. Nick is a commuter and lives on the North Shore of , an actual island but still part of the New York metropolitan area.

Fitzgerald called the village where Nick and Gatsby live West Egg; the Buchanans live in CONTEXT East Egg. West Egg is based upon an actual place called King’s Point, on the Great Neck peninsula; East Egg is based upon Sands Point, a village on the Cow Neck Peninsula. These Flushing Meadows park, two peninsulas jut into a stretch of water called , which is an estuary in the New York district of the Atlantic Ocean. New York’s East River runs into Long Island Sound. called Queens, now contains the venue for George and Myrtle Wilson’s home is in a ‘valley of ashes’ (p. 26) that seems to be based the US Open tennis upon the Corona Ash Dumps, refuse tips for the city’s waste, formerly located on the site of tournament. what is now a public park called Flushing Meadows.

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