Chicago '09ers: let's get to know each other!

spazzity
Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:42:00 +0000

insubvert: I’m not too sure where you’re getting the “mirage” of the American Dream from. I never realized that the existence of the American Dream was in dispute; I thought it was fairly obvious that the American Dream did indeed exist; regardless of its brevity or falseness, it did exist at one point. After all, isn’t the entire book supposed to be about the fall of the American Dream?
Also, I would argue that Nick is really just as judgmental as Tom or Daisy or Jordan by the end of the book, and that Nick lies worse than Gatsby does; while Gatsby at least admits to himself that he’s telling all of these lies, and only lies to those around him, Nick continues his presumption of being so holy compared to everyone around him, and will not admit to himself the extent of his lying.

drownergurl29: I agree that Nick lies to himself, and therefore espouses the worst type of lying, but I’ll have to disagree about the homosexuality. While I personally think that Nick is in fact homosexual, I also believe that it is a highly debatable matter; that scene is so abstract and ambiguous that a very reasonable, non-homosexual interpretation could be given for it, and many have. Also, even if he were homosexual and lying to himself about it, I wouldn’t really hold it against him, because homosexuality was much more stigmatic in the 1920’s than it is now, and now we still are having huge cultural and political wars (i.e. prop 8) over the issue; depending on your surroundings, homosexuality may still be just as full of stigma as it was nearly a century ago, sadly. That said, I do think that Nick is actually homosexual, but that Fitzgerald purposely downplayed all potentially sexual aspects of the novel because needed a somewhat sexually detached narrator in order to not have romance be the focus of the novel, as it very well could have been with the Tom-Daisy-Gatsby triangle and whatnot. Or, I guess you could also analyze the whole novel from a sexual standpoint, which could be interesting…hmmm…