English Prep: The Great Gatsby

The passage I have chosen from the novel is in Chapter 2, page 27 - paragraph 4. There is a lot of imagery used in the passage, Fitzgerald writes with a lot of description and the description is very detailed. The passage is very vivid and the reason is Fitzgerald uses one of the five senses and it appeals to our sight, “I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad… the road”. It is very detailed and there are a lot of visual images in the passage too. “The only building on sight…waste land.” The narrator, Nick Carraway describes the building he sees as a ‘small yellow brick’ and he also mentions that the place looks like a wasteland that suggests that he thinks that this place is not a nice place and it is a filthy area. The quote “and contiguous to absolutely nothing” tells me that it is a little abandoned and there were only 3 shops on the road where Nick was, there was a building which was for rent and it conveys to me that there isn’t many people working there, the other two shops were just a all-night restaurant and a garage. Nick Carraway finds it odd that Tom Buchanan is taking him to a relatively poor area in the city because Tom’s very rich and he didn’t think that he would go to places like this. Nick says that “the interior was unprosperous and bare…dim corner.” The only actual thing they had in the garage was the ‘dust-covered wreck of a Ford’ and it shows evidence that the garage is not earning a lot of money as he mentions the word ‘unprosperous’; The quote “This shadow of a garage must be a blind…overhead” illustrates that Nick personally thinks that there would have been some ‘sumptuous’ buildings behind the garage since Tom brought him here, but he had mistaken about it because there was actually nothing behind it. Tom Buchanan’s