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The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Decent Essays

The Great Gatsby Essay In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nick – the narrator – is an incredibly observant and perceptive young man who is quick to notice the subtext hidden under people and their relationships. Nick uses the imagery of windows frequently in his descriptions of significant people and decisive events to express his observations of the unspoken truths these people and events hold. Because Nick is interested in having deep insight and observation into the lives other people lead, he often uses the imagery of windows in his narrative, allowing him to demonstrate his ability to see through people’s inner lives, particularly Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s. Nick demonstrates a profound interest in observing other humans and their lives, and uses the imagery of windows to demonstrate his ability to do so. First and foremost, he “[imagines] that in a few minutes [he] was going to enter [people’s] lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove” (56), demonstrating a desire to understand people at a non-superficial level. Furthermore, Nick describes how he was going to “become again that most limited of specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram – life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all” (4). This is the first instance in which Nick uses the imagery of looking through windows to refer to observation of human nature. He further develops this analogy on page 35; he says: “yet high over the city our line of yellow

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