About half the novel’s actions take place on either East Egg or West Egg, fictional northern Long Island villages still graced with the mansions of Gilded Age millionaires.Ĭharacters escape to Manhattan, big and glittering, either to entertain their mistresses or to dine with gentlemen of suspicious occupation.Īnd then, of course, there’s the wasteland in between, where secrets are laid bare and burnt to ash. There are three principal types of locations in The Great Gatsby. In comparison, try reading Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned- an embittered New York book twice as long with half as much to say– to appreciate the brevity of Gatsby.įitzgerald uses the locales of 1922 New York City so precisely - jetting around Long Island and over the bridge to Manhattan - that it seems almost possible to map the characters’ every move. It’s one of the most economic stories of the 20th century, an exercise of graceful control, an epic with powerful restraint. The Great Gatsby deserves to be savored for many reasons that I had forgotten or never noticed through the filter of creating a B+ term paper in my teenage years. Maybe that’s wearing white to a funeral, so to speak, but true masterpieces can weather an occasional glare. One reason I’m excited about the film, with all its superficial decadence on display, is that it seems to discard several decades of nine-dimensional analyses that have settled upon the book like a thick shroud of dust. Few works of American literature have been as comprehensively analyzed as The Great Gatsby, by which I mean, of course, over-analyzed.
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