Edward Albee 's Who 's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf

The discussion immediately preceding the characterization is most pressing on an interpretation of this self-characterization, as it provides a clear example of Nick's dishonesty just moments before he claims to be perfectly honest. Nick says of Jordan Baker, "Her grey sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her" (63). But, however, before he could actively pursue Miss Baker, he acknowledges, there was one little matter he had to deal with:

From the start of the play, the reader is lead to believe that Martha has the other hand and she is the most powerful in the relationship. Being mean, brutally honesty and cynical makes people to believe she is powerful. On a night similar to the night of this plays, George and Martha create a son. This is a figment of their imaginations, to hold together their failing marriage. The rules to keep the son alive with in them, is to never speak of this son to any one else. Well Martha told her guests about their son. George seeing an opportunity to get Martha back for exposing their lies decides that their son dies tonight. In a game George created to expose every ones lies, whether it be Nick marring Honey because she got pregnant and has money or Martha's fake son, No one will leave their house tonight not embarrassed and exposed. George is using his knowledge of the truth, as a power against people. He tells Martha in front of her guest

Nick points out a “secret place above the trees” that Gatsby could reach if he “climbed alone”; this secret place is the high-society life Gatsby has wanted all his life, but the only way for him to attain is it by leaving Daisy behind. Gatsby knows this and chooses to kiss Daisy anyway, where he “forever wed[s] his unutterable visions to her perishable breath”. Gatsby’s dreams were so vast and could have been gained had he not signed a death certificate by involving himself with Daisy, and Nick understands this. Gatsby loses a major part of himself to Daisy at this point in the story by devoting literally everything he does to her and remains just steps away from literally worshipping her. Another example of details is when Nick tells Gatsby not to “ask too much of [Daisy]” because “you can’t repeat the past”. This is something Gatsby refuses to accept as the truth and insists that he’s “going to fix everything just the way it was before”. At this point Nick registers that Gatsby’s life has been “confused and disordered” since he met Daisy and that he is actually stuck in the past. Nick is trying his best to deter Gatsby from pursuing Daisy yet Gatsby continues to ignore his one true friend that has only his best interests at

Nick throughout the story Nick tries to understand what causes people to be lured by his cousin Daisy, but never truly understands until Gatsby, who has held Daisy so high throughout the novel, says that “Her voice is full of money” (Fitzgerald 120). Nick, through these words, has a revelation he can’t believe he was so naïve to have been fooled by Daisy’s lure of money. Daisy is driven by greed and Nick finally, sees that the secret Daisy voice has always hidden was the secret of her greed. Daisy lured those around her to feel comfort in her vast wealth but she could never have enough of it, never enough wealth, never enough people surrounding her because she herself feels weak and feels like a fool. She believes that “…the best thing a girl can be in this world a beautiful fool.” (Fitzgerald 21) Nick and Daisy share a weaker side and hide it from the world and Nick can see that in even listening to Daisy he has shown weakness “It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me” (Fitzgerald 21) He believes that he is so weak as to allow Daisy to make him feel sympathy for her. Nick believes that Daisy has tricked him all throughout the evening but in reality, Nick has been fooled by Daisy throughout the novel and Nick would have been trapped in his naïve and weak state had it not been for Gatsby giving Nick hope

In New York, Nick yet again proves himself as just an observer. Nick is reading a book in the apartment Tom bought for Myrtle, as both Tom and Myrtle have sex (Fitzgerald 29). Nick does not interrupt, and continues to read his book. Nick still just observes when Myrtle’s nose is broken by Tom’s hand (Fitzgerald 37). Nick does not make a move to help Myrtle to a hospital or reprimand Tom, furthering the idea that Nick is alike the Deist God, unconcerned. For Nick to observe Myrtle and Tom having sex is similar to God observing Adam and Eve having sex. Adam and Eve had intercourse and conceived when kicked out of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 4:1). Adam and Eve were kicked out due to temptation, in their case, the temptation of knowledge. Myrtle and Tom are not able to have sex in the paradisiacal Eggs, therefore they are like cast offs. Forced to have intimate moments in a less than paradisiacal apartment building, they are still under the watch of the god figure, Nick. Nick, being like a God, can view the most intimate moments unavailable to the average eye. This shows that Nick can not only create tea party’s but see things others cannot, not in an observant way, but in a godly

George and Martha play a game to make their days more interesting. They create experiences that make them more interesting. The main experience that is fabricated is having a son. Martha starts the falsehood by mentioning to Honey that she and George had a son. If having a fake son wasn't enough she made sure to add that his 21st birthday was the next day.

He expresses his discomfort towards Jordan’s lies, stating: “She was incurably dishonest”, thus he sees himself as a moral center as he says he is the “only honest person” he knows (47-48). This shows that Nick, full of pure, traditional morals, is uncomfortable when confronted with modern “loose” moral people and

Gatsby fully introduces himself to Nick while they are riding one of his luxurious cars. Gatsby wants to ensure that Nick is aware of the “truthfulness” of his background, so he won’t have to make judgements based on the rumors that were spread during the parties. He conveys that once his family died, they left a great sum of money for him. With this money, Gatsby lived an opulent life in different parts of Europe amassing his time by committing to various activities such as collecting jewels, hunting, painting, and attempting to forget a disheartening moment in his past. Nick wants to laugh at Gatsby’s story because it is very intricate and seems unreasonable in that there aren’t big games to hunt nor chiefly rubies available in Europe. There is a great vitality of mystique surrounding Gatsby because of his false, yet interesting stories.

In the first introduction page, the readers discover Daisy's cousin, Nick who recognizes that he had many advantages in life seeing that he born into a wealthy family and had a great opportunity to education. Although Nick might not have been as wealthy as Daisy and Tom, he was quite content with his riches based on the words of his father who had told him that, "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."(Fitzgerald, 5). Through his father's wise words, his amount of wealth was sufficient for him and unlike the others, he didn’t let his

The world that Nick recounts is full of idealizations. When Nick first encounters Jordan and Daisy, “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house” (8). The women here sound like something out of a fairy tale. They come off as fantastical but are not as good of people as they may seem. Their false presentation brings up the lies behind everyone’s presentation. Gatsby, as well, is not what he presents himself as. He is said to be an “Oxford man” but only visited Oxford with Dan Cody. The façades are a part of society’s attempt to be something it is not and to present itself as something better than it is. The truth is that they are all, in their own ways, like Tom and Daisy

When J. Gatsby returned after becoming rich making money, he asked daisy to divorce tom and marry him, she refused, as she thought that tom’s name was more respectable then Gatsby and he was richer than Gatsby. Even though daisy married a wealthy and respectable men but she is not satisfied nor happy with her life, when Nick goes to daisy’s house for a visit, daisy tells him about her daughter “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool. ”(Page-21).

Even though I tend to like the gory nature of a gruesome death, I don’t favor Dillard’s piece over Woolf’s. I ask myself why that is? Why do I prefer Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth to Annie Dillard’s The Death of a Moth? The answer I conclude, is that I have biographical knowledge of one over the other. The personal background on Woolf allows me to better understand the writer and, thus, the possible meaning of the piece. I will read and interpret what I believe a piece is about, but I like to find out what the author’s story is. With the author’s story in mind, I will reread and see what she may have meant based on their life story. I know Woolf’s story and can empathize with her, in doing so, better understand the deeper meaning of

Virginia Woolf, an early twentieth century English modernist, uses a combination of symbols,imagery, and diction to demonstrate to her audience the ultimate struggle between life and death and the inescapable inevitability of death.

For Nick, Gatsby's lies, his affectation and his fraud are no matter; nor is his failure to win back Daisy; what matters is the supporting belief in the value of striving for a marvelous object, not its predictable disappearance and meaninglessness. In a significant shift in of the novel's final sentences, Nick unites Gatsby's effort with a general, if unspecified, national collective.

Albee describes his work as “an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.”