The analysis of Extract 1

The first extract from the first chapter of the novel “The Great Gatsby”
begins with the words that the father once told Nick Carraway, “Whenever you
feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t
had the advantages that you’ve had.” The narrator himself emphasizes that he
carried these words through his life, which does not only demonstrate their
importance for Nick Carraway but portrays the Nick himself as a thoughtful and
reserved person. Trying to follow father’s advice, Nick became tolerant, which
made him suffer a lot. Additionally, Nick inspires confidence because he positions
himself as a distant and detached narrator who is going to “reserve all judgements”
and therefore make the whole story more objective.
The advice given by the father is similar to the one given to Laertes by
Polonius from Shakesperean Hamlet, especially in the sense that one should “give
every man thy ear, but few thy voice”. The phrase “reserve all judgements” met in
the novel thrice is borrowed from this famous monologue, which means that we
deal with the philological context.
As it was said, Nick’s tolerance makes him suffer a lot. In particular, he was
“unjustly accused of being a politician.” This word has a double meaning in the
context. On the one hand, there was an American senator Thaddeus Horatius
Caraway referred to by his contemporaries as a reliable and honest man not
involved in any scandal and the sincerest politician in the history. It is also known
that in the draft notes Nick’s surname was spelled as Caraway, which could be the
case of social-historical context. So, Nick Carraway meant to say that he is a
reliable person. On the other hand, the word politician, beside the primary
meaning, has an additional one, “a sly and ingratiating person”.
Despite the fact that Nick Carraway does not judge people, trying to apply
his father’s principle, there is one person who appears to be an exception. Gatsby is
the kind of people whom Nick felt “unaffected scorn” to. However, by the end of
the novel Nick Carraway changes his attitude to Gatsby and says that “Gatsby
turned to be alright”. Unaffected scorn turned into great admiration. The reason of
original unaffected scorn was Gatsby’s gaudiness, which also can be traced back to
Polonius (“rich, not gaudy”). The word “gaudy” and its derivatives acquire greater
artistic significance, they are used to portray Gatsby. Direct link between
Shakespearean texts and Fitzgerald’s text is the matter of literary allusion.
Beside the richness in vertical context, the extract is provided with
metaphors, especially those related to the war and army. First of all, there is the
phrase “the world to be in uniform”, which, on the one hand, has a military
meaning, but on the other hand, it acquires a different meaning, the meaning of
monotony. Then immediately comes the next metaphor, “to stand at a sort of moral
attention”. To stand at attention means to stand straight with eyes forward and feet
together. But Fitzgerald distorts the phrase by adding an attribute – moral
attention. He plays upon the military context and uses the device of sustained
metaphor. Finally, the word “veteran” has a positive meaning and denotes an
experienced person, but Fitzgerald adds a noun “bore” to make the whole phrase
sarcastic.
However, it is not only military metaphors that we meet in this extract. Nick
Carraway mentions that “conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet
marshes”, which is also a metaphor. These phrases are related to the two ways of
acting, the strict moral principles being compared with the hard rock and the loose
morals being compared with the wet marshes.
Given all mentioned above, one can conclude that the individual word
combinations are prevailing in the novel over the reproducible word combinations,
each word combination and metaphor having an artistic value of its own and
serving to global purport of the novel.
The extract itself sets the starting point of the novel and its global purport,
the father’s advice, and introduces the narrator and the main character of the novel.