Research Paper Proposal The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby Close Reading and Paper Proposal

I would use this passage to argue the following claim:

In the conclusive moments of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald implements tense as a literary instrument to express the idea that it is worthless to look for meaning in our ambitions, since ambition alone gives meaning to life. The author writes Nick Carraway’s solitary contemplation of the past in the past tense, but when the character concludes that the struggle itself is more meaningful than the meaning behind the struggle, the character’s tense shifts suddenly into the future and provides the reader with a profound impression of Fitzgerald’s theme.

How this passage led me to my claim:

As Carraway is receding from West Egg, the former habitation of his late friend Gatsby, he is, at the same time, contemplating his own recession into the past and the life of his deceased friend. As the distance between Carraway and the island widens, so does the distance between the character and a former time – a moment that the author makes all the more effectual through the usage of the past tense and through such words and phrases as “vanished trees,” “transitory,” “melt away,” and “once.”

The author uses the calm and natural current as a metaphor for the calm and passive manner in which Carraway is, in that moment, allowing the past itself to carry him away. Without a struggle, and without the ambitions and the dreams that he and Gatsby had once enjoyed, Carraway beholds the “vanishing trees” and the “inessential houses,” while the current bears him slowly, but surely, into the “past.” It is a moment that informs the reader that the end of the novel has come and that all of the colorful and passionate moments that Gat...

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...ts against the current,” was all that mattered to Gatsby; the meaning behind that struggle, of little or no importance.

Where else I might look in the novel to test this claim:

1. Jay Gatsby left home, disowned his parents and adopted Dan Cody, a millionaire, as his father.

2. Gatsby basked in the glory of his fictitious portrayal of an Oxford man and a war hero, so as to give credence to his indiscriminate methodologies to acquire wealth and success.

3. Gatsby’s intense desire and ambition to become wealthy was exemplified in his involvement with Meyer Wolfsheim’s illegal business practices.

4. Gatsby’s overwhelming passion to get Daisy back, drove him to live in a mansion across the bay from her house.

5. At Gatsby’s funeral, Gatsby’s biological father presents Carraway with Gatsby’s writings – carefully planned schedules and notes on self-improvement.