Reading The Great Gatsby through the Eyes of Nick Carraway
Presentation Type
Oral and/or Visual Presentation
Presenter Major(s)
English
Mentor Information
Avis Hewitt, hewitta@gvsu.edu
Department
English
Location
Kirkhof Center 2270
Start Date
13-4-2011 1:30 PM
End Date
13-4-2011 2:00 PM
Keywords
Philosophy/ Literature
Abstract
Nick Carraway, the narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, serves as a nuanced instrument for portraying the novel's characters and their interactions. His salient quality as a habitual listener allows them to open up to him, permitting the reader to get to know them through his eyes. Therefore, Nick's beliefs and perceptions shape the way that the personalities and interactions of his fellow characters appear to us. Nick lets us see Gatsby in a more complex light than we otherwise could. Winifred F. Bevilacqua's "In Ecstatic Cahoots': Nick's Authoring of Gatsby" supports this notion. Bevilacqua uses the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to develop her thesis: "I argue that Bakhtin's theories in Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (1924-1927) give us the concepts and patterns that best enable us to understand Nick's strategies in the strand of his narrative that traces the process by which he achieves and gives form to his understanding of Gatsby's inner self."
Reading The Great Gatsby through the Eyes of Nick Carraway
Kirkhof Center 2270
Nick Carraway, the narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, serves as a nuanced instrument for portraying the novel's characters and their interactions. His salient quality as a habitual listener allows them to open up to him, permitting the reader to get to know them through his eyes. Therefore, Nick's beliefs and perceptions shape the way that the personalities and interactions of his fellow characters appear to us. Nick lets us see Gatsby in a more complex light than we otherwise could. Winifred F. Bevilacqua's "In Ecstatic Cahoots': Nick's Authoring of Gatsby" supports this notion. Bevilacqua uses the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to develop her thesis: "I argue that Bakhtin's theories in Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (1924-1927) give us the concepts and patterns that best enable us to understand Nick's strategies in the strand of his narrative that traces the process by which he achieves and gives form to his understanding of Gatsby's inner self."