how is the Great Gatsby a story of the West?

Question

i know that the Great Gatsby was a story set in the east, but Nick claims it is a story of the west why is it so? THis is for an AP class so I need a strong answer. Thank YOu.!

Answer 1

Nick muses that, in some ways, this story is a story of the West even though it has taken place entirely on the East Coast. Nick, Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all from west of the Appalachians, and Nick believes that the reactions of each, himself included, to living the fast-paced, lurid lifestyle of the East has shaped his or her behavior. Nick remembers life in the Midwest, full of snow, trains, and Christmas wreaths, and thinks that the East seems grotesque and distorted by comparison.

"Obviously, the creation of a reliable narrator of the Gatsby-Daisy story at the heart of The Great Gatsby was central in Fitzgerald's achieving verisimilitude. However, the simple love story was merely the foundation for a narrative structure that would accommodate Fitzgerald's ideas about irreconcilable contradictions within the American Dream and ultimately about the ideal quest itself. Young Jay Gatsby, through the discipline of Benjamin Franklin-like charts and schedules, has prepared himself to receive all that America has to offer and believes naively that he can have the embodiment of it, the wealthy Louisville debutante Daisy Fay, the only "nice" girl he has ever known, if he can but find the currency to buy his way into her life. It is Nick, the middle-class everyman without particular allegiance to either the privileged or working class, who has enough objectivity to comprehend the awful irony that Gatsby's dream has been futile from the beginning: he will never be accepted into the world of old money that Daisy could never leave. At this level the love story approaches allegory, and because Nick, like all of the main characters in the novel, is a Westerner, he is credible as narrator of the allegory, which he calls "a story of the West, after all." He knows about the infinite hope of the frontier spirit, and he also has witnessed the corruption of the American promise of equality for all."

"By introducing the areas as this, and by the characters he puts in each, he gives symbolic meaning to them all. He uses what is kind of like a moral Geography, on the literal level it is but different places, in the West and the East, that look like eggs and a dirty place, however, on the symbolic level it is evil, hope, and despair. East Egg was home to many of the "Rich" people of old money, and pretty much the highest class, that is on the literal level. However, symbolically it was a place that was the epitome of the worlds filth, where all the carelessness abided. One would, having not read the story at all or perhaps not carefully enough, probably have guessed the Valley Of Ashes instead to have been the place that had eroded the world with it's filth, however, that is not the case, for the filth that abided in the East was what took over and eroded the Valley of ashes. The filth was spreading, but the West was still safe, full of hope, however, as seen at the end of the story, even the West was not unaffected by the East for the hope died, along with the hoper, because "He was looking in the wrong direction."

Now this does not mean that the book was saying the East is bad and the West is good as in New York stinks and California is good, however he was simply using the land as symbols of greater things. The book is basically about, "The American Dream, which in the book was dreamt greatly by Gatsby, and how this worlds materialism is ruining it. Gatsby's dream was unselfish and true, it was, essentially, to find his true love and have it perfect in every way. Therefore he was clouded and looked for this within Daisy Buchanan, who, as we see later in the story, is very low on morals despite the books first impression of her. She was the rich girl hiding behind her money and so Gatsby hoped that, if he got money, he could hide behind it with her. However, to gain the money he was in fact immoral, as the story will show, and thus he tainted the purified dream, adding in materialism to it's beauty and destroying it. "

Answer 2

Perhaps Western Civilization?

Answer 3

THAT BOOK BORED ME i NEVER READ iT BUT DiD MAi WORK ON iT