GG- critical quotations

myrtle & gatsby compara

“myrtle and gatsby are each others mirror image - both highly aspirational, social climbers, both think a rich buchanan will give them the life that they want, both use sexual economics in different ways”

“gatsby has a more appealing version of the same story whereas myrtles version is degraded, the aristocratic version is depicted in more attractive terms”

nick false narrative

“he is aware that just as much as gatsbys personality, the human psyche and the post-war world, his narrative is a false and uneasy reconstruction”

gatsby fragmentation

“he is a composite of fragments, regardless whether or not those fragments hold any truth”

valley of ashes

“a place of decomposition, of brokenness, of desolation and fragmentation where people and objects are reduced to a sludgy grey and where definition ceases”

gatsby time

“some deep refusal to accept the linear irreversibility of time”

gatsby green light

“the green light offers gatsby a suitably inaccessible focus for his yearning, something to give definition to desire”

“lights too closely approached may well lose their supernal lustre and revert to unrousing ordinariness. You can only wish on the star you can’t reach”

buchanans

“embodying the sort of devouring, self-pleasuring and hypocritical materialism”

gatsby more

“holding out for the possibility, the necessity of that something else, something more, which materialism can never satisfy”