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Rawson's Use Of The Telephone In The Great Gatsby

Decent Essays

In this article, “The telephonic logic of ‘The Great Gatsby”’, Eric Rawson introduces a new character and explains how this character is import in the advancement of the plot. There is always an uninvited guest that rudely interrupts but doesn’t have a face or more so it changes every time. The telephone was so common place by this time that no one found it odd that it always interrupted and disturbed people in the room many times throughout the novel, but in most houses in east and west egg people had telephones installed. Telephones are the new face of communication in 1920s America and now it was easier than ever to reach someone from across the river. It was now “speech that lack[ed] a speaker’s body” (92), while before letters were personalized or people would just communicate with each other in person. …show more content…

Rawson describes how important the telephone is by telling us all the events that unfold because of it like being invited to Gatsby’s parties and Nick and Gatsby’s business and many more. To show how important the telephone is, Rawson describes it as a “character” (94) but a less transparent one that Fitzgerald didn’t want to create a personality for but instead to just have a voice. Many events throughout the novel only exist because of a phone call and many could be fabricated since it was never officially documented by the reader. Rawson shows that Fitzgerald failed in created a factual narrator who speakers “authoritatively of affectual matters” (95). It’s hard to trust the narrator when he himself has strong feelings about what’s going on and only gives what he thinks should be told to the audience not everything that possibly happened. Although Rawson finds Nick to be a trustworthy narrator his story isn’t the facts and the actual truth but more of an emotional and

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