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Setting - Coggle Diagram
Setting
Time
- According to the preface in TGG, the word 'time' is mentioned 87 times & there are 450 time related words through the book
- It is obvious that Fitzgerald wanted to emphasise the significance of time, seeing as it is one of the most prevalent themes throughout
- Portrays the simultaneous desire to reach our future & relive our past
- Conveys the message that a life lived in an idealised past is simply no life at all
- The past will never be able to be re written
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Place
Valley of Ashes
- Description recalls the bleak spiritual landscape of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem published in 1922, the year TGG is set
- Poem exposes the materialistic & consumerist values in modern society, mirrors Fitzgerald's aims in his novel
- VoA represents those who were excluded from the Roaring 20s
- Ashes & dust remind reader of the 'foul dust' that preyed on Gatsby
- Eyes of Doctor T.J Eckleburg watch everything in the VoA, calls to mins the Nietzsche's theory of 'the death of God' in late 1800s & the rise of media & power of advertisements
'A fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges & hills & grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses & chimneys & rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly & already crumbling through the powdery air'
- 'wheat' & 'gardens' are associated with life & nature whilst 'ashes' belong to the realm of death
- Fitzgerald combines these images in contrast, to highlight that beauty is destroyed
- if 'ashes grow like wheat' then death rules & spreads. Simile reveals spread of immortality in 1920s America
- Fitzgerald uses long lists of the objects made from ash to emphasise the scale of decay
- repetition of 'and' & polysyndeton, slows pace of reading, emphasising the trudging drudgery of life in the VoA
- Image of 'transcendent effort' shows how all the men's energy is taken up in just existing & the American dream is out of reach for the working class
- the idea that the rich get richer
Manhattan
- Tom & Myrtle's apartment represents the place of immortality
- The group drink themselves senseless 7 fulfil their sexual desires
- Apartment becomes fertile ground for sin & evil
East & West Egg
- Old money East Egg is opposite new money West Egg > symbolically highlights the class rivalry
- Tom's riding clothes highlight his old money status. Brute like body suggests masculinity, making Tom scary & positions him as antagonist of the novel