Why is setting important in the great gatsby

For instance, the magical yet desolate and creepy setting of the moors in Wuthering Heights creates the prevailing air of menace, imprisonment, and terror that infects that novel. Contrast this with the cozy setting of Little Women , where the March house represents the loving, close-knit, family atmosphere of the novel as a whole.

Settings are used for symbolic or thematic purposes. Sometimes a particular setting is linked to one of the novel's themes, functions as a symbol, or if used to make moral, ethical, or aesthetic judgments. For example, in The Great Gatsby , the Valley of Ashes — an industrial neighborhood in Queens — symbolizes the desperate circumstances of those who are victims of the capitalist system the novel describes. There's a reason horror movies aren't typically set in sunny green meadows.

Before analyzing the Great Gatsby settings, I'm going to briefly explain and describe all the different settings that the novel uses. The Great Gatsby takes place during the summer of The s are a period that is sometimes called the Roaring 20s or the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby takes place in the United States. Most of the characters come from the Midwest to the East Coast. In the novel, the East Coast setting is divided into three distinct places: Manhattan, Long Island, and an industrial part of Queens that the novel calls either the Valley of Ashes or just the ashheaps.

Gatsby 's Long Island is broken down into two incredibly wealthy towns that face each other across a bay: West Egg, less fashionable and home to new money people, and East Egg, where older and more established families live.

We see two West Egg settings: Jay Gatsby's sprawling, extravagant mansion, and Nick Carraway's small rented house next door. In the novel's version of Queens, the main setting is George Wilson's garage and the road that runs next to it, connecting Long Island and Manhattan. Oheka Castle, one of the real life mansions that are said to have inspired Fitzgerald. Our citation format in this guide is chapter. We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book.

To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it Paragraph beginning of chapter; middle of chapter; on: end of chapter , or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text. The young men who fought in the war were dubbed The Lost Generation: the devastated and aimless survivors and the needlessly slaughtered dead.

The post-war period in America was later dubbed the Roaring 20s because of the country's rapidly growing economy and the greater influence abroad that came as a result of American involvement in the war. Many of the things this time period is famous for connect with events in the novel. The Great Gatsby pointedly takes place during the summer, as opposed to any other season. I say pointedly because the novel goes out of its way to assign meaning to summertime and to contrast it with the rest of the year - and often even with itself.

For example, summer is somehow both healthfully airy and horribly suffocating. Nick initially relishes the Long Island summer, shirking his work because there is "so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air" 1.

But in the tense confrontation in the Plaza Hotel, where Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy have a life-changing fight, the oppressive and unbearable summer heat means the room has basically no breathable air at all:.

The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four o'clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park Similarly, it's up for debate whether the summer brings with it life - the way we typically associate new foliage with a sense of rebirth - or not. On the one hand, Nick starts out with a traditional view of the summertime:.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees - just as things grow in fast movies - I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. But soon, Jordan compares summer unfavorably to the potentially positive change that fall brings when she says. This desire to have life start over again is crucial, since this novel is so interested in how the wish for forward momentum fights against the way the past anchors us and pulls us back.

Despite his initial positive feelings about the summer on the East Coast, Nick eventually reverts to his roots in the Midwest. He contrasts the disappointing summer he spends on Long Island with the season he associates with Midwestern wholesomeness and goodness - winter :. That's my middle west—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.

I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

I don't know about you, but I'll take this version of summer any day. Now let's tackle the Great Gatsby settings that function as foils to one another. We can analyze them by comparing and contrasting them to each other. Considering Nick eventually decides that what he has written is really the story of Midwesterners failing to make it on the East Coast , these might be the two most significant settings in the novel.

Still, before we dive in, it's important to remember that this Midwest is Nick's version of the Midwest, which is often undercut for instance, a lot of Gatsby's criminal business comes as phone calls from big Midwestern cities like Detroit. Nick describes the Midwest as the center of all things moral and wholesome. It's a place where everyone is friendly, happy, innocent, and so much "in it together," that when he is describing his memories of the Midwest, Nick doesn't use the pronoun "I," but instead starts writing in the first floors person plural "we":.

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This or That's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances and the matchings of invitations: "Are you going to the Ordways'?

And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate. When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air.

We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again. In contrast, the East Coast is a place where everyone is so out for themselves, that after Gatsby dies none of the people whom he spent an entire summer entertaining can even be bothered enough to come to his funeral.

In the beginning, this Midwestern quality of goodness strikes Nick as boring, which is why he decides to go East to New York:. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business.

But after his experiences during the summer, Nick comes to see the East as a kind of nightmare of debauchery, violence, and a disregard for human life :.

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg especially still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon.

In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.

After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction.

It's the easiest place to accommodate sexual indiscretions and shady business dealings:. Partly this is because Manhattan is portrayed as a melting pot where a diversity of social classes, races, and backgrounds is par for the course, and where unusual people don't really stand out.

For example, check out this passage where Nick and Gatsby are driving into the city:. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends.

The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday.

As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry. There are wealthy African-Americans, European immigrants, the living and the dead, all mixed together without a problem. The city is awash in possibility, the "wild promise" that anything could happen there - "even Gatsby. Also, misdeeds are easy to get away with in Manhattan because its size affords everyone enormous anonymity , which Nick loves:.

Yet pictures of costly silken suits and diamond encrusted pocket watches hardly seem like fitting attire for the likes of common mobsters. It seems inconceivable that they could have hit enough people over the head to afford such luxuries. Respectable working families looked up to these rough riders as the ultimate success story demonstrating the survival of the fittest and the ingenuity of the American man.

The "old money" folks are able to see right through his deceptions. Irrevocably when his house of cards falls, all those friends that he treasured turned out to simply be parasitic people who take advantage of his generosity.

Short Summary of The Great Gatsby While The Great Gatsby is a highly specific portrait of American society during the Roaring Twenties, its story is also one that has been told hundreds of times, and is perhaps as old as America itself: a man claws his way from rags to riches, only to find that his wealth cannot afford him the privileges enjoyed by those born into the upper class.

The central character is Jay Gatsby, a wealthy New Yorker of indeterminate occupation. Gatsby is primarily known for the lavish parties he throws every weekend at his ostentatious Gothic mansion in West Egg.

He is suspected of being involved in illegal bootlegging and other underworld activities. Although this group was prominent in the American South, there were still a couple members in the North. By the s, th The Great Gatbsy portrays an accurate representation of America during the Prohibition. In conclusion, The Great Gatsby is an accurate representation of the American Roaring Twenties through the historical depiction of the American Dream, flapper girls, and the Prohibition.

This movie shows the time period where the war just ended and America was eager to dream of obtaining wealth as well as having a materialistic life.

These degenerates played an important role in American history, they were more than just bank-robbers and gunslingers, and they were men that affected all facets of society.

They were celebrities, some of the most recognized men in America. Their evil deeds made the front page of every newspaper. They were some of the richest men in America, but most of all; they were the scapegoats for America's problems. They were hated by many, respected by few and feared by all.

The vulgar newly rich citizens were ruining society as morals loosened all around. Old money became hypocrisy, claiming they were pure when they were just as ruined as the new money. This is demonstrated in the Great Gatsby by Tom Buchanon. He does this while flaunting his own relationship with his mistress. The west represents the new form of wealth, while the east represents old money. How did Gatsby die? In the end of the book, Gatsby did die. He was shot by George Wilson because of a misunderstanding -- George believed that he was the one involved in an affair with his wife Myrtle and killed her in a car accident.

Gatsby does die in the end of the novel. Daisy actually killed Myrtle by accident but in Gatsby's car. Why is Gatsby Great? He is considered 'great' in a paradoxical sense. Gatsby is considered 'great' by the measurement of dreams, his wealth, his larger-than-life personality, the festivities and joviality that, to others in the novel, mark him as a man of high stature and almost god-like in personal proportions.

How setting affects a story? Story Elements: Importance of the Setting. Setting is the time and place where a scene occurs. It can help set the mood, influence the way characters behave, affect the dialog, foreshadow events, invoke an emotional response, reflect the society in which the characters live, and sometimes even plays a part in the story. Who kills Gatsby? George Wilson. Is Gatsby a true story? How real is The Great Gatsby's playboy island?

But his adaptation is faithful to the plot of Scott Fitzgerald's novel published in