Use of Newspapers in Great Gatsby and In Darkness At Noon

Newspapers: everyone reads them, but are they telling the truth or just gossip and lies? In Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald the motif of newspapers, used by each author, represents lies that the media tells and how people will believe those lies. The authors use the motif to promote the universal theme that media is used to manipulate the beliefs of the people. In Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, Koestler uses the motif to emphasize the fact that the Party uses newspapers for propaganda and that the newspapers tell half-truths. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald uses the motif of newspapers to show that people prefer to read gossip.

In both books, the authors Koestler and Fitzgerald use the newspaper motif to tell lies and to cover up the truth. In The Great Gatsby, “some one with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the expression ‘madman’ as he bent over Wilson’s body…set the key for the newspaper reports…Most of those reports were a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial, eager, and untrue”(163). This states right in it that the newspapers were lying about what had happened to Wilson and Gatsby and that one term set it all up. In Darkness at Noon it says in the cell on the top left of the window there is “a broken pane” that “had a piece of newspaper stuck over”(9), which signifies that the Party is trying to cover up Rubashov’s view and hide the truth from him. The piece of newspaper on the windowpane covers part of his view outside, which represents how the newspaper limits and obscures his beliefs and logic; the Party causes this because they control the prison cells and they permit his view be obscured. Lies are shown again on page 11 when Rubashov believes that all they publish is “nonsense” and are made of old information that was dug up. The “nonsense” that they publish is used to cover up the truth that the people can’t know. From pages 196 until 203, when Vera reads the newspaper to Vassilij, it is all about Rubashov’s trial and his confession to his oppositional views, but doesn’t tell how or why Rubashov confessed to these accusations. The paper won’t say that Rubashov was tortured; it covers up that detail in order to make it look as if everything Rubashov said was true.