Setting in The Great Gatsby

Write about some of the ways setting is created in “The Great Gatsby”.

·         Fact that Nick Carraway has returned to the place from where his family’s from, he’s an “original settler”

·         We find out about West Egg and East Egg through him, thus giving us a more realistic view of the entire setting of the story

·         Nick explains a lot of the happenings in the two places, gives us a feel of the kind of people or class of men and women who lived there

·         We see that there is a stark difference in the nouveaux riche who live in West Egg, while East Egg is home to the ‘historically rich’

·         Fitzgerald uses land and water to bring out the inaccessibility between the two – West Egg and East Egg are two islands separated by the Sound, or a stretch of water and this body of water acts as a barrier between the two

·         Within West Egg itself, we see contrast in Gatsby’s and Carraway’s house. The former’s residence is no less than a mansion, while Carraway, who considers himself well-off anyway, is struggling to make his ends meet at home. But, Nick takes pride in being the neighbour of such an influential and well-known man; this dissolves Nick’s feeling of inferiority compared to Gatsby

·         Nick describes the Buchanan’s house as an ‘elaborate Georgian Colonial mansion,’ and the fact that it has a lawn running for a quarter of a mile before the entrance to it almost gives the reader a sense that the house has been made to complement the garden, and not the other way round. Also, ‘bright vines’ adorn the mansion’s walls unlike Nick’s ‘thin beard of raw ivy,’ which again brings up the theme of difference in society