Progress Report #1

The novel “The Great Gatsby” is a story about a self-made millionaire and his pursuit of
Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy woman. The novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, who comes back
from World War 1 and looks for a house in New York and surprisingly gets a house nearby the
mansions of the newly rich and also neighbour of Jay Gatsby. The novel is also about how tough
it is to change one's future and how impossible it is to go back in time. The main character of the
book is obviously Jay Gatsby. Although initially, Gatsby was an unknown character, Nick's
introduction and the book's title make it clear that Gatsby's story will be the main subject of the
book. It has been mentioned that Gatsby wants Daisy, who is Nick's cousin in the novel and also
the woman Gatsby once loved, as the plot of the book develops and Nick is pushed farther and
deeper into his complex world. Any obstacle that stands in the way of Gatsby and Daisy is
deemed an enemy. The most obvious adversary is Daisy's violent husband Tom, but other, more
ethereal ideas like class difference, societal expectations, and Gatsby’s past lies can also be
considered antagonists.
The novel is written in first-person from Nick's perspective. This means Nick uses the
word "I" to describe events as he witnessed them. Unless they tell him, he has no idea what the
other characters are thinking. Although Nick narrates the book, he is largely incidental to the
events, except for facilitating Daisy and Gatsby's meeting. For the most part, he remains a
bystander to the events unfolding around him, fading into the background when it comes time to
recount pivotal meetings between Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy. In several long passages, his voice
completely disappears, and he describes the thoughts and feelings of other characters as if he is
inside their heads. When Gatsby tells Nick about his past with Daisy. His voice completely
vanishes in a few lengthy passages, and he describes the sensations and thoughts of other people
as if he were inside their heads. Nick writes straight from Gatsby's perspective when he informs
Nick about his history with Daisy. As Daisy's white face approached his own, his heart began to
beat more quickly. When he kissed this female, he realized that his mind would never again romp
as God's mind would. Thus, he waited. The first-person narration is not violated because these
paragraphs are presented as memories Gatsby had told Nick. When a character in a book tells the
story in the first person, a crucial question for the reader is how much trust to place in the
narrator's credibility. Because the narrator always applies his or her own prejudices to the
circumstances while telling a story from one person's perspective, the narrator is virtually always
untrustworthy in some way. Some narrators purposefully mislead the audience. These narrators
and those whose words can generally not be trusted are referred to as "unreliable narrators."
Because Fitzgerald makes no indicators that Nick Carraway is deceiving the reader or that his
account of the events directly conflicts with anybody else's, Nick Carraway is not a
conventionally unreliable narrator. He seems to want to be as truthful as possible. He tells us
right away that he has an uncanny ability to reserve judgment and get people to trust him, which
encourages us to see him as a reliable narrator. At the same time, he also says “I am one of the
few honest people I have ever known.” His very need to describe himself this way makes the
reader question how much Nick can actually be trusted.
The theme of the novel is to be a tale of a man and woman's unfulfilled love. However,
the novel's central idea has a much wider, less romantic perspective. The Great Gatsby is a
highly symbolic reflection on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the
American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess, even though all of its
action occurs over a brief period of time in the summer of 1922 and is set in a specific
geographical area near Long Island, New York.

Fitzgerald depicts the 1920s as a time of deteriorating societal and moral norms, as shown by its
pervasive cynicism, avarice, and pointless pursuit of pleasure. The irrational joy that led to
decadent parties and wild jazz music epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that
Gatsby throws every Saturday night resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream,
as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals. When World War
I ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became intensely
disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the Victorian social morality of
early-twentieth-century America seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the
stock market in the aftermath of the war led to a sudden, sustained increase in national wealth
and a newfound materialism, as people began to spend and consume at unprecedented levels. A
person from any social background could, potentially, make a fortune, but the American
aristocracy families with old wealth scorned the newly rich industrialists and speculators.
Additionally, the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the sale of
alcohol, created a thriving underworld designed to satisfy the massive demand for bootleg liquor
among rich and poor alike.

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The novel “The Great Gatsby” is a story about a self-made millionaire and his pursuit of

conventionally unreliable narrator. He seems to want to be as truthful as possible. He tells us

reader question how much Nick can actually be trusted.

geographical area near Long Island, New York.

among rich and poor alike.

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