Before We Melted Indistinguishably Into It Again

One reason that The Great Gatsby has now become a byword for the East Coast of the Roaring 20s - the decadently extravagant post-WWI era - is that Fitzgerald was amazing at creating memorable settings. Whether it's the sprawling luxury of Gatsby'due south mansion, the drunken chaos of Myrtle'southward apartment, or the suffocating airlessness of a suite at the Plaza Hotel, The Great Gatsby features settings that perfectly encapsulate character, mood, atmosphere, and emotions.

In this article, I'll go through all of the Great Gatsby settings, explain what role settings play in a novel, show how these settings compare with ane some other, and explore what symbolic meaning they take.

Article Roadmap

1. Why Is Setting Important
2. All the Settings in The Great Gatsby
3. Great Gatsby Time Period Setting
   • 1922
   • Summertime
4. Comparing and Contrasting PairedSmashing Gatsby Locations
   • Midwest versus East Coast
   • Manhattan versus Long Island
   • East Egg versus West Egg
   • Gatsby's mansion versus Daisy and Tom's mansion
5. The Valley of Ashes: Setting and Symbol
6. How to Write About Setting

Why Is Setting Important?

The literary term "setting" means the time and place of a novel's events. If the characters are the "who," then the setting is the "where" and "when." This "where and when" can be very general - for example, "20th century World." Alternately, the setting tin can exist each of the many unlike places where whatever of the novel's actions occur, no matter how small. For instance, y'all could a imagine a domestic drama where different rooms in the same house work as different settings.

Usually, novels feature several different settings, and authors employ descriptive language to explain what these times and places look, aroma, audio, and maybe even feel similar. Using these descriptions, we tin can learn a lot!

Settings help readers fully sympathize characters. Graphic symbol backgrounds, motivations, and the pressures they feel from their surroundings and surrounding society, are often coded into the places where they are. For example, a twenty-year-quondam woman in a novel set in Victorian England would be under enormous pressure to get married and take kids (this desperation is the plot of Edith Wharton's The Firm of Mirth). Meanwhile, the aforementioned woman in a novel set in today's NYC is going to exist more worried virtually getting a job (the main drama in The Devil Wears Prada).

Settings develop or affect plot. Deportment that are commonplace in one setting would exist impossible in some other. Oftentimes this has to practise with what is and isn't considered acceptable behavior. Other times, it has to do with the engineering, transportation, or means of communication that are available in a particular time. Many bad decisions in G. R. R. Martin'due southSong of Water ice and Burn down happen considering it takes weeks or months to get a piece of information from one castle to another - the quasi-medieval setting dictates this function of the plot.

Settings contribute to mood, tone, and atmosphere. Many novels utilise setting as a way of developing a particular mood. For example, the magical yet desolate and creepy setting of the moors inWuthering Heights creates the prevailing air of menace, imprisonment, and terror that infects that novel. Contrast this with the cozy setting ofPiddling Women, where the March business firm represents the loving, shut-knit, family temper of the novel as a whole.

Settings are used for symbolic or thematic purposes. Sometimes a particular setting is linked to i of the novel'south themes, functions as a symbol, or if used to make moral, upstanding, or artful judgments. For example, in The Bang-up Gatsby, the Valley of Ashes – an industrial neighborhood in Queens – symbolizes the drastic circumstances of those who are victims of the backer organisation the novel describes.

In that location's a reason horror movies aren't typically set in sunny dark-green meadows.

All the Settings In The Swell Gatsby

Earlier analyzing theSwell Gatsby settings, I'thousand going to briefly explain and draw all the unlike settings that the novel uses.

Time Setting

The Great Gatsby takes identify during the summer of 1922. The 1920s are a period that is sometimes chosen the Roaring 20s or the Jazz Historic period.

Location Settings

The Great Gatsby takes place in the United States. Almost of the characters come from the Midwest to the Due east Coast.

In the novel, the Due east Coast setting is divided into three singled-out places: Manhattan, Long Island, and an industrial part of Queens that the novel calls either the Valley of Ashes or simply the ashheaps.

In Manhattan, we see ii main settings: Tom and Myrtle'south apartment uptown in Harlem, and a suite in the very posh Plaza Hotel next to Central Park.

Gatsby'south Long Isle is cleaved down into ii incredibly wealthy towns that face each other beyond a bay: West Egg, less fashionable and home to new money people, and East Egg, where older and more established families live.

We see two W Egg settings: Jay Gatsby'south sprawling, extravagant mansion, and Nick Carraway'southward modest rented business firm next door.

In E Egg lies Tom and Daisy Buchanan's red and white Georgian mansion.

In the novel'south version of Queens, the main setting is George Wilson'due south garage and the road that runs next to information technology, connecting Long Island and Manhattan.

Oheka Castle, one of the real life mansions that are said to have inspired Fitzgerald.

Quick Notation on Our Citations

Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). Nosotros're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book. To notice a quotation nosotros cite via chapter and paragraph in your volume, you tin either eyeball information technology (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of affiliate; fifty-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if yous're using an online or eReader version of the text.

Great Gatsby Time Menstruum Setting

What makes the Roaring 20's different from other periods in history, and why does all the activeness have place in the summer time?

1922

The novel takes identify during a period of enormous modify and transition for the U.Due south.

1919 brought the end of Earth War I, a state of war marked by its massive death cost and the horrors of trench warfare which countered the image of soldiering as glorious and heroic. The young men who fought in the state of war were dubbed The Lost Generation: the devastated and aimless survivors and the needlessly slaughtered expressionless.

The post-war menstruum in America was later dubbed the Roaring 20s because of the country's speedily growing economy and the greater influence abroad that came as a effect of American involvement in the state of war. Many of the things this fourth dimension period is famous for connect with events in the novel.

• Prohibition went into consequence in 1920, making nigh all recreation booze illegal. This means that any time you see people drinking alcohol in the novel, they are breaking the police force. Moreover, Gatsby's enormous wealth comes from him beingness a bootlegger - someone who illegally sells alcohol

• Women got the correct to vote in 1919, and the Equal Rights Subpoena was first introduced in Congress in 1923. InThe Great Gatsby, the power and agency of women come up often. The iii women in the novel make choices most their independence; Daisy and Myrtle discover information technology hard to escape dysfunctional marriages, though they effort through affairs; Jordan is able to lead a more independent life.

• The production and ownership of cars skyrocketed afterward Ford popularized the efficient mass production of cars by assembly line. In the 1920, ane out of 4 Americans owned a machine. In the novel, cars are associated with danger and recklessness, as people are constantly either talking about car accidents or getting into them. And of class, the climax of the novel is when Daisy runs over and kills Myrtle.

Summer

The Great Gatsby pointedly takes place during the summer, every bit opposed to any other season. I say pointedly because the novel goes out of its style to assign meaning to summertime and to contrast it with the residue of the year - and oftentimes even with itself.

For example, summer is somehow both healthfully airy and horribly suffocating. Nick initially relishes the Long Island summertime, shirking his work because there is "so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air" (1.12).

But in the tense confrontation in the Plaza Hotel, where Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy have a life-changing fight, the oppressive and unbearable summertime heat means the room has basically no breathable air at all:

The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already 4 o'clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park...

"Open another window," commanded Daisy, without turning effectually.

"There aren't any more."

"Well, nosotros'd meliorate telephone for an axe——"

"The affair to do is to forget about the heat," said Tom impatiently. "You lot make information technology 10 times worse by crabbing near information technology."

... the compressed heat exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn's Nuptials March from the ballroom below.

"Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!" cried Jordan dismally.

(seven.174-190)

Similarly, it's up for debate whether the summer brings with it life - the style we typically acquaintance new foliage with a sense of rebirth - or not. On the one hand, Nick starts out with a traditional view of the summertime:

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees - just every bit things grow in fast movies - I had that familiar conviction that life was first over once again with the summer. (1.eleven)

But soon, Jordan compares summer unfavorably to the potentially positive alter that fall brings when she says.

Life starts all over again when it gets well-baked in the fall. (seven.75)

This desire to have life start over again is crucial, since this novel is so interested in how the wish for forward momentum fights against the way the past anchors us and pulls u.s.a. back. Despite his initial positive feelings most the summer on the Eastward Coast, Nick somewhen reverts to his roots in the Midwest. He contrasts the disappointing summer he spends on Long Isle with the season he assembly with Midwestern wholesomeness and goodness - winter:

That's my middle west—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am office of that, a picayune solemn with the experience of those long winters, a niggling complacent from growing up in the Carraway business firm in a city where dwellings are notwithstanding called through decades by a family'due south proper noun. I run into now that this has been a story of the Due west, afterwards all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Hashemite kingdom of jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. (9.125)

I don't know almost yous, only I'll accept this version of summertime any solar day.

Comparison and Contrasting PairedGreat Gatsby Locations

Now let'due south tackle the Great Gatsby settingsthat function as foils to 1 another. Nosotros can analyze them by comparison and contrasting them to each other.

Midwest vs. East Coast

Because Nick somewhen decides that what he has written is really the story of Midwesterners failing to go far on the Due east Declension, these might be the two about significant settings in the novel.

Still, before we dive in, it's of import to remember that this Midwest is Nick's version of the Midwest, which is oft undercut (for instance, a lot of Gatsby'south criminal business comes equally telephone calls from large Midwestern cities like Detroit).

Nick describes the Midwest as the middle of all things moral and wholesome. It's a place where everyone is friendly, happy, innocent, and so much "in information technology together," that when he is describing his memories of the Midwest, Nick doesn't use the pronoun "I," merely instead starts writing in the first floors person plural "we":

I of my most bright memories is of coming back west from prep schoolhouse and subsequently from higher at Christmas time... I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This or That's and the churr of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead every bit we caught sight of erstwhile acquaintances and the matchings of invitations: "Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?" and the long greenish tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And final the murky yellow cars of the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter dark and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the common cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this land for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into information technology over again. (ix.123-124)

In contrast, the East Declension is a place where everyone is so out for themselves, that after Gatsby dies none of the people whom he spent an unabridged summer entertaining tin even exist bothered plenty to come to his funeral.

In the first, this Midwestern quality of goodness strikes Nick as boring, which is why he decides to become East to New York:

Instead of being the warm center of the earth the heart-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—and so I decided to go due east and learn the bond business. (1.half-dozen)

But after his experiences during the summer, Nick comes to run across the Due east as a kind of nightmare of debauchery, violence, and a disregard for homo life:

Even when the E excited me most, even when I was almost keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns across the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared just the children and the very old—fifty-fifty so it had e'er for me a quality of baloney. West Egg especially however figures in my more fantastic dreams. I run across it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at in one case conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging heaven and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in clothes suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken adult female in a white evening wearing apparel. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles common cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no i knows the woman's name, and no ane cares.

Afterwards Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction. (9.126-127)

Manhattan vs. Long Island

The activity in The Great Gatsby is nigh evenly split between Manhattan and Long Isle.

Overall, Manhattan is the place where characters become to show off their condone for club's rules and lawful behavior. Information technology's the easiest place to accommodate sexual indiscretions and shady business dealings:

• In Chapter ii, Tom takes Nick there to meet his mistress, Myrtle, and go to a political party at their apartment, where Tom has sex with her while Nick waits, and where Tom ends the evening by punching Myrtle in the face.

• Gatsby takes Nick to Manhattan in Chapter 4 to have lunch with Meyer Wolfshiem, the gangster who fixed the World Series and who is Gatsby'south business partner.

• Finally, Gatsby, Nick, Daisy, Hashemite kingdom of jordan, and Tom to go Manhattan in the explosive Chapter 7 showdown where Daisy chooses Tom over Gatsby.

Partly this is considering Manhattan is portrayed as a melting pot where a variety of social classes, races, and backgrounds is par for the class, and where unusual people don't really stand up out. For case, bank check out this passage where Nick and Gatsby are driving into the metropolis:

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the metropolis seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with fatigued blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of s-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby'southward excellent car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed united states, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all. . . ."

Fifty-fifty Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder. (4.55-58)

There are wealthy African-Americans, European immigrants, the living and the dead, all mixed together without a problem. The urban center is awash in possibility, the "wild promise" that anything could happen there - "even Gatsby."

Also, misdeeds are easy to become away with in Manhattan considering its size affords everyone enormous anonymity, which Nick loves:

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at nighttime and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. (3.157)

On the other hand,Long Isle is a much smaller, more insular community. Instead of shrugging off anonymous misbehavior, the people on Long Island intendance securely about who their neighbors are and what they are doing. It's harder to conduct diplomacy, shady business, or any else at that place without incurring the moral opprobrium of everyone else.

While Gatsby is unremarkable in Manhattan, in Due west Egg he becomes the focal point of unending rumors. People say he is related to Kaiser Willhelm (the ruler of Germany during WWI, and thus America's chief enemy), that he is a German spy, and any number of other things:

Gatsby'south notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and then become authorities on his past, had increased all summertime until he roughshod just short of being news. Contemporary legends such equally the "cloak-and-dagger pipe-line to Canada" attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't alive in a business firm at all, only in a gunkhole that looked similar a firm and was moved secretly upwards and down the Long Island shore. (6.5)

Similarly, Tom's affair with Myrtle benefits from its city setting, every bit Tom feels gratis to cheat on his wife in public: "he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew" (2.4). Meanwhile, when Daisy and Gatsby beginning their matter, Gatsby has to burn down his unabridged household staff because he is worried that his servants will tell anybody what they've seen:

Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his house a calendar week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never went into Westward Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen... The grocery boy reported that the kitchen looked like a hole, and the general opinion in the village was that the new people weren't servants at all.

Next mean solar day Gatsby chosen me on the telephone.

"Going away?" I inquired.

"No, old sport."

"I hear you fired all your servants."

"I wanted somebody who wouldn't gossip. (7. 9-14)

You tin see how rumor immediately spreads and is uncontainable in the close circles of Long Isle. Even despite all of Gatsby's precautions, Nick has already "heard" from someone else that Gatsby has fired all his servants.

This minute observation of one's neighbors really differentiates the towns in Long Island from the big city of Manhattan.

The rumor manufacturing plant even brings a reporter out to interview Gatsby in Chapter half-dozen.

West Egg vs. East Egg

While very rich people live in both East Egg and West Egg, the divergence is the kind of rich people live in each town.

East Egg is for the old coin crowd - people whose wealth is inherited, and who have been the upper chaff of society for generations. In dissimilarity,Westward Egg is for the nouveau riche - self-fabricated people who have become rich recently and who were originally born into working or middle-form families.

This means that in generalanybody from East Egg looks downwardly on everyone from West Egg in order to demonstrate their superiority. (Nick is one of the exceptions: he lives in West Egg despite having the family background necessary to fit in in Due east Egg). At one of Gatsby'southward parties, Nick hangs out with an Due east Egg group who don't socialize with anyone else and who are clearly there to mock and be appalled past the other party guests:

Jordan invited me to join her own party who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden...Instead of rambling this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside—E Egg cavalier to Due west Egg, and carefully on guard confronting its spectroscopic gayety. (3.37)

This also means that since they tin can't distinguish themselves through their wealth, East Egg residents rely on their better understanding of the nuances and minutiae of manners and behavior to betoken that they are so very far to a higher place their West Egg neighbors. We get the sense that every East Egg person is forever sending knowing looks at every other East Egg person every fourth dimension they encounter someone from West Egg. For instance, check out Gatsby's come across with Tom's horseback riding friend Sloane and his woman friend, when Gatsby repeatedly puts his foot in his mouth:

Mr. Sloane didn't enter into the conversation simply lounged dorsum haughtily in his chair; the woman said zippo either - until unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.

"We'll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby," she suggested. "What practice y'all say?"

"Certainly. I'd be delighted to have you." ...

"Y'all come to supper with me," said the lady enthusiastically. "Both of y'all." ...

Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go and he didn't see that Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn't...

"My God, I believe the homo'south coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she doesn't want him?"

"She says she does desire him." ...

Of a sudden Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted their horses.

"Come on," said Mr. Sloane to Tom, "we're late. We've got to become." So to me: "Tell him we couldn't look, will you?"

Tom and I shook hands, the remainder of us exchanged a cool nod and they trotted chop-chop down the drive, disappearing under the Baronial leafage just as Gatsby with lid and light overcoat in mitt came out the front door. (half dozen.38-59)

Gatsby, the quintessential West Egg-er, can't tell that the adult female doesn't want him to come up to her party. He is even less able to meet that Sloane really doesn't want him to come. And he doesn't seem to sense how rude they are being to him - something which Tom and Nick pick up on immediately.

This social cluelessness and lack of social adroitness translate into the style with which Gatsby lives his life. He spends enormous sums of money, only with every purchase, he is ever showing that he is new to the moneyed scene. Allow's see how this plays out in his house.

Gatsby'southward Mansion vs. Daisy and Tom's Mansion

The differences between old money and new money are reflected primarily by differences in style, aesthetics, and gustatory modality.

Gatsby typifies the ostentatious, over-the-top conspicuous consumption of those whose wealth is new and so must be always on brandish:

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less stylish of the ii, though this is a most superficial tag to limited the baroque and not a lilliputian sinister contrast between them. My firm was at the very tip of the egg, only 50 yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen grand a flavour. The one on my right was a colossal affair past whatsoever standard—it was a factual fake of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a sparse beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more twoscore acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby'due south mansion. (ane.fourteen)

His house is a reproduction of French chateau. This is ridiculous both because this French design is out of place in America, and likewise because it is a visibly brand new building trying to replicate something that would be centuries old. It's completely ludicrous, and it is telling that the only person who has the desired response to this mansion is Gatsby'southward father:

Information technology was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dingy with many easily. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. "Look in that location!" so sought admiration from my eyes. (9.102)

Gatsby'due south father has the aforementioned taste as Gatsby - the appreciation of a poor person for the trappings of wealth.

Meanwhile, Daisy and Tom alive in a business firm that is also extravagant, but one that has its luxury somewhat curtained:

Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the embankment and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over dominicus-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in vivid vines as though from the momentum of its run. The forepart was broken by a line of French windows, glowing at present with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon (1.eighteen)

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass exterior that seemed to grow a little way into the firm. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one cease and out the other like pale flags, twisting them upwardly toward the frosted wedding ceremony block of the ceiling—then rippled over the wine-colored rug (i.26)

The business firm is much more fit for its location - Georgian Colonial is an architectural style that is appropriate to America (as its proper name suggests, it came from England during the colonial catamenia).

The clarification also confirms the permanence of the Buchanans' mansion. Gatsby's house is fighting with its surroundings (it'southward off both in time period, and it seems to be having a problem with the "raw" ivy). In contrast, Daisy and Tom'due south business firm is and then much a part of the environment that the grass "seemed to abound a picayune way into the house," blurring outside and within just similar the open windows that permit the breeze blow through.

It may non exist likewise much to read some foreshadowing into these contrasting descriptions: Gatsby's firm is too new and not rooted enough. Meanwhile, the identify where Daisy and Tom live is deeply embedded and seems unbreakable.

No one's pulling this matter out of the basis anytime soon.

The Valley of Ashes: Setting and Symbol

The Valley of Ashes in The Not bad Gatsby functions both every bit a literal identify where the climactic event of the novel happens, and is likewise a powerful symbol – in other words, a physical object that stands for an abstract idea continued to the novel's themes.

The Valley of Ashes is the proper noun that Nick gives to an industrial neighborhood in Queens that the rich take to drive through on their style from the Eggs to Manhattan. This is where George Wilson has his gas station, and where Myrtle Wilson is run over and killed past Daisy. Suitably, it is a horribly bleak and drab place:

About half way betwixt West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, and then as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes abound similar wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes accept the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible rails, gives out a ghastly crepitate and comes to residuum, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable deject which screens their obscure operations from your sight. (2.one)

This is the identify where those who cannot make information technology in the cutthroat world of E Coast capitalism end up. It is also the identify propping up much of that wealth through the product coming from the factories that are polluting the spot.

But the description that transforms the ash that covers everything from simply being dust to a scary substance capable of creating otherworldly plans and people signals that this Valley of Ashes has rich symbolic pregnant. For a detailed analysis of how this symbol functions within the great Gatsby, check out our manufactures on how to approach symbols in general and on the Valley of Ashes every bit a symbol in detail.

How to Write About The Bully Gatsby Setting

So how do you use setting to create a compelling essay?

Pick a Topic

In that location are several ways to go about finding your topic when tackling this kind of assignment. Here are some possibilities:

Shut reading. You can focus on settings themselves, digging really deeply into the description of one, two, or more places or times in the novel to explore how word selection, similes, metaphors, and any other literary devices help the reader visualize location. For instance, you could trace the style the word "ash" appears in the novel, at kickoff defining The Valley of Ashes itself is a kind of fantastical alternating reality, and so spreading out toward the places of the privileged. Yous could focus on a literary device called metonymy, using a part to stand in for the whole, and explore why the novel chooses to focus on Dustin Ash every bit the representative aspect of this neighborhood.

Connection to character. Frequently, setting is a way to define character. If you write about this, your essay volition tease out the common qualities of a character and of the identify nigh closely associated with that character. These will either exist synergistic, with i amplifying the other, or else they will play as a dissimilarity, undercutting the graphic symbol. In our example, for instance, Gatsby's mansion speaks volumes about how he sees himself and his money, and also most the vast gulf that separates him from the upper aristocracy that he really wants to exist function of. Conversely, Nick'due south pokey niggling business firm seems humble and unassuming, much like Nick wants to project himself to be. But in reality, by being located adjacent to obscenely luxurious mansions, the house is simply falsely modest, and shows off some of Nick'south poorly disguised snobbery. (Read more about all the novel'south characters in our overview article.)

Connexion to theme. Similarly, setting can aid clarify a novel's theme by providing a concrete example of an abstruse idea. In the nifty Gatsby, you could focus on the way one or more of the settings play into the failure of the American Dream, 1 of this novel's about salient themes. One way to do this would be to focus on the Valley of Ashes, the place where dreams come up to dice, both literally and figuratively. If the idea of the American dream is that through hard work anyone tin can go successful, and then George Wilson'due south tragic fate, as exemplified through his garage and circumstances, serves to completely deflate this myth.

Create an Argument

It'south not enough to just describe i of the novel's settings and explain its possible connections to either graphic symbol or theme - or to compare and contrast it to another setting. Instead, y'all have to make sure that you're making some kind of point about why/how the setting functions in the novel as a whole.

How do y'all know if you're making an argument and not merely saying the obvious? If y'all tin can imagine someone arguing the reverse of what you're saying, then yous've got an argument on your hands.

Once you've figured out what you want to fence, commencement small past analyzing chunks of the text where the symbol pops upwards, and then broadening your points out to the balance of the book. This way, your argument will be strengthened by textual evidence.

What's Adjacent?

Larn how to write well-nigh the themesthat settings are usually linked to.

Get aid on other assignments by reading our guide on analyzing or comparing and contrasting characters.

Brush up on the context of these settingsin our summary of The Swell Gatsby.

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Nigh the Author

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high schoolhouse, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to college pedagogy.

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Source: https://blog.prepscholar.com/the-great-gatsby-setting

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