Reading Nostalgia: Textual Memory in the Great Gatsby
(Click the themes infographic to download.)
Pro tip from the olds at Shmoop: if the best years of your life took identify in high schoolhouse, y'all're in for a long downhill slide. There'southward nothing wrong with remembering the expert times, but living in the past but leads yous to tragedy. (Or at least to being a major bore at parties.) In The Great Gatsby, living in the past is a lot direr than beingness boring. Characters pursue visions of the future that are determined by their pasts, which—in the memorable phrase that ends the book—makes usa all into niggling boats chirapsia against the current. And, unfortunately, some of those boats are doomed to sink.
Questions Nigh Memory and the Past
- Nick Carraway says that the futurity is always receding in front end of u.s.a., and that we're forever beaten back towards the past. Is the future attainable in The Nifty Gatsby? Or, to put it another manner, can information technology ever be tomorrow?
- Nick tells Gatsby that "you can't repeat the past," merely he insists at the end that nosotros're constantly "borne back" into it. Did he modify his listen, or are these two different ways of saying the same thing?
- Is the by remembered realistically? Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan akin think nostalgically almost the past, but are they ever able to confront reality?
- Is Gatsby driven past his memory of the by or his dream for the future? Is in that location a difference?
- What are Nick'due south visions of his own future?
Chew on This
Gatsby ends upwards dead considering he tin can't alive in the present—and then he tin can't alive at all.
Daisy, different Gatsby, is ultimately able to face reality and live in the nowadays.
Source: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/great-gatsby/themes/memory-and-the-past
0 Response to "Reading Nostalgia: Textual Memory in the Great Gatsby"
Post a Comment