How Is Gatsbys House Described

One reason that The Great Gatsby has now become a byword for the East Declension of the Roaring 20s - the decadently extravagant mail service-WWI era - is that Fitzgerald was amazing at creating memorable settings. Whether it's the sprawling luxury of Gatsby's mansion, the drunken chaos of Myrtle's apartment, or the suffocating airlessness of a suite at the Plaza Hotel, The Dandy Gatsby features settings that perfectly encapsulate character, mood, atmosphere, and emotions.

In this article, I'll become through all of the Great Gatsby settings, explain what role settings play in a novel, show how these settings compare with 1 some other, and explore what symbolic meaning they have.

Article Roadmap

Why Is Setting Important
All the Settings in The Neat Gatsby
Keen Gatsby Time Menses Setting
- 1922
- Summertime
Comparison and Contrasting PairedGreat Gatsby Locations
- Midwest versus East Coast
- Manhattan versus Long Island
- East Egg versus Due west Egg
- Gatsby's mansion versus Daisy and Tom'south mansion
The Valley of Ashes: Setting and Symbol
How to Write About Setting

Why Is Setting Important?

The literary term "setting" means the time and place of a novel'south events. If the characters are the "who," and then the setting is the "where" and "when." This "where and when" can be very general - for case, "20th century Earth." Alternately, the setting can exist each of the many dissimilar places where whatsoever of the novel's actions occur, no matter how minor. For instance, yous could a imagine a domestic drama where different rooms in the same house piece of work as different settings.

Usually, novels characteristic several different settings, and authors utilize descriptive linguistic communication to explain what these times and places expect, smell, sound, and maybe even feel like. Using these descriptions, we can acquire a lot!

Settings help readers fully understand characters. Character backgrounds, motivations, and the pressures they experience from their surround and surrounding society, are often coded into the places where they are. For case, a 20-year-sometime adult female in a novel set in Victorian England would be nether enormous pressure to get married and have kids (this agony is the plot of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth). Meanwhile, the same woman in a novel gear up in today'due south NYC is going to be more than worried nearly getting a job (the master drama in The Devil Wears Prada).

Settings develop or impact plot. Deportment that are commonplace in ane setting would exist incommunicable in another. Often this has to do with what is and isn't considered acceptable behavior. Other times, it has to exercise with the engineering, transportation, or ways of advice that are available in a item time. Many bad decisions in 1000. R. R. Martin'sVocal of Water ice and Fire happen because it takes weeks or months to get a piece of information from one castle to another - the quasi-medieval setting dictates this role of the plot.

Settings contribute to mood, tone, and atmosphere. Many novels utilise setting as a mode of developing a particular mood. For instance, the magical yet desolate and creepy setting of the moors inWuthering Heights creates the prevailing air of menace, imprisonment, and terror that infects that novel. Contrast this with the cozy setting ofPiffling Women, where the March house represents the loving, close-knit, family atmosphere of the novel as a whole.

Settings are used for symbolic or thematic purposes. Sometimes a particular setting is linked to i of the novel's themes, functions as a symbol, or if used to make moral, upstanding, or aesthetic judgments. For instance, in The Bully Gatsby, the Valley of Ashes – an industrial neighborhood in Queens – symbolizes the desperate circumstances of those who are victims of the capitalist organisation the novel describes.

In that location's a reason horror movies aren't typically ready in sunny greenish meadows.

All the Settings In The Groovy Gatsby

Before analyzing theNeat Gatsby settings, I'chiliad going to briefly explain and depict all the different settings that the novel uses.

Time Setting

The Slap-up Gatsby takes place during the summer of 1922. The 1920s are a period that is sometimes called the Roaring 20s or the Jazz Age.

Location Settings

The Great Gatsby takes place in the United states. Most of the characters come up from the Midwest to the East Coast.

In the novel, the East Coast setting is divided into three singled-out places: Manhattan, Long Island, and an industrial role of Queens that the novel calls either the Valley of Ashes or but the ashheaps.

In Manhattan, we see two main settings: Tom and Myrtle'due south apartment uptown in Harlem, and a suite in the very posh Plaza Hotel next to Central Park.

Gatsby's Long Island is broken down into ii incredibly wealthy towns that face each other across a bay: West Egg, less stylish and home to new coin people, and East Egg, where older and more established families live.

We come across two W Egg settings: Jay Gatsby's sprawling, extravagant mansion, and Nick Carraway's pocket-size rented firm side by side door.

In E Egg lies Tom and Daisy Buchanan's ruby and white Georgian mansion.

In the novel's version of Queens, the main setting is George Wilson'southward garage and the route that runs next to it, connecting Long Island and Manhattan.

Oheka Castle, one of the real life mansions that are said to have inspired Fitzgerald.

Quick Note on Our Citations

Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). We're using this organization since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book. To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you tin can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or employ the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text.

Great Gatsby Fourth dimension Period Setting

What makes the Roaring 20's different from other periods in history, and why does all the action have place in the summertime fourth dimension?

1922

The novel takes place during a catamenia of enormous change and transition for the U.S.

1919 brought the terminate of Earth State of war I, a war marked by its massive expiry toll and the horrors of trench warfare which countered the image of soldiering every bit glorious and heroic. The young men who fought in the war were dubbed The Lost Generation: the devastated and bumming survivors and the needlessly slaughtered dead.

The post-state of war menses in America was afterwards dubbed the Roaring 20s considering of the state'south rapidly growing economy and the greater influence abroad that came as a outcome of American involvement in the war. Many of the things this time period is famous for connect with events in the novel.

Prohibition went into effect in 1920, making virtually all recreation alcohol illegal. This means that any time you see people drinking alcohol in the novel, they are breaking the police force. Moreover, Gatsby's enormous wealth comes from him being a bootlegger - someone who illegally sells alcohol

Women got the right to vote in 1919, and the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923. InThe Great Gatsby, the ability and agency of women come up up oftentimes. The iii women in the novel brand choices about their independence; Daisy and Myrtle find it hard to escape dysfunctional marriages, though they try through diplomacy; Jordan is able to lead a more independent life.

The product and ownership of cars skyrocketed after Ford popularized the efficient mass production of cars past assembly line. In the 1920, 1 out of 4 Americans owned a car. In the novel, cars are associated with danger and recklessness, as people are constantly either talking about auto accidents or getting into them. And of form, the climax of the novel is when Daisy runs over and kills Myrtle.

Summer

The Great Gatsby pointedly takes identify during the summertime, as opposed to any other season. I say pointedly considering the novel goes out of its manner to assign pregnant to summertime and to contrast it with the remainder of the year - and often even with itself.

For example, summer is somehow both healthfully airy and horribly suffocating. Nick initially relishes the Long Island summer, shirking his work because there is "so much fine wellness to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air" (one.12).

Simply in the tense confrontation in the Plaza Hotel, where Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy have a life-changing fight, the oppressive and unbearable summer heat means the room has basically no breathable air at all:

The room was big and stifling, and, though it was already four o'clock, opening the windows admitted simply a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park...

"Open another window," commanded Daisy, without turning effectually.

"At that place aren't whatsoever more than."

"Well, we'd better phone for an axe——"

"The thing to practice is to forget about the estrus," said Tom impatiently. "Yous make it x times worse by crabbing about it."

... the compressed heat exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn's Nuptials March from the ballroom below.

"Imagine marrying everyone in this heat!" cried Jordan dismally.

(7.174-190)

Similarly, it'due south up for debate whether the summer brings with it life - the way we typically associate new foliage with a sense of rebirth - or non. On the ane hand, Nick starts out with a traditional view of the summertime:

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees - just every bit things grow in fast movies - I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over once again with the summer. (1.11)

Simply soon, Jordan compares summer unfavorably to the potentially positive alter that fall brings when she says.

Life starts all over once again when it gets crisp in the fall. (seven.75)

This desire to take life start over again is crucial, since this novel is so interested in how the wish for forward momentum fights against the mode the past anchors usa and pulls usa dorsum. Despite his initial positive feelings about the summertime on the East Coast, Nick eventually reverts to his roots in the Midwest. He contrasts the disappointing summer he spends on Long Island with the season he associates with Midwestern wholesomeness and goodness - winter:

That'southward my middle west—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns just the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little conceited from growing upwardly in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are withal called through decades past a family unit's proper noun. I encounter now that this has been a story of the Westward, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in mutual which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. (9.125)

I don't know almost you lot, but I'll take this version of summer whatever day.

Comparing and Contrasting PairedGreat Gatsby Locations

Now let'south tackle the Swell Gatsby settingsthat function equally foils to i another. We can analyze them by comparing and contrasting them to each other.

Midwest vs. East Coast

Considering Nick somewhen decides that what he has written is really the story of Midwesterners failing to make it on the East Coast, these might be the ii most significant settings in the novel.

Still, before we swoop in, it's important to think that this Midwest is Nick'southward version of the Midwest, which is oftentimes undercut (for case, a lot of Gatsby'south criminal business comes as phone calls from big Midwestern cities similar Detroit).

Nick describes the Midwest equally the center of all things moral and wholesome. It'southward a place where everyone is friendly, happy, innocent, then much "in it together," that when he is describing his memories of the Midwest, Nick doesn't use the pronoun "I," but instead starts writing in the first floors person plural "we":

I of my most vivid memories is of coming back due west from prep schoolhouse and later from college at Christmas time... I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This or That'south and the churr of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead equally we caught sight of old acquaintances and the matchings of invitations: "Are yous going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?" and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And final the murky xanthous cars of the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When nosotros pulled out into the wintertime night and the real snow, our snowfall, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small-scale Wisconsin stations moved past, a abrupt wild brace came of a sudden into the air. We drew in deep breaths of information technology as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this land for 1 strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again. (ix.123-124)

In contrast, the East Coast is a place where anybody is so out for themselves, that afterwards Gatsby dies none of the people whom he spent an unabridged summer entertaining can even exist bothered enough to come up to his funeral.

In the beginning, this Midwestern quality of goodness strikes Nick as tedious, which is why he decides to become E to New York:

Instead of existence the warm center of the world the heart-westward now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—and then I decided to go due east and learn the bond business. (1.6)

Just after his experiences during the summer, Nick comes to see the E as a kind of nightmare of debauchery, violence, and a disregard for homo life:

Even when the East excited me almost, fifty-fifty when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, bloated towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—fifty-fifty then it had always for me a quality of baloney. West Egg especially even so figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see information technology equally a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at one time conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground iv solemn men in clothes suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening wearing apparel. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's proper noun, and no one cares.

Afterward Gatsby'south death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my optics' power of correction. (ix.126-127)

Manhattan vs. Long Island

The action in The Great Gatsby is about evenly split between Manhattan and Long Island.

Overall, Manhattan is the place where characters go to show off their disregard for lodge'due south rules and lawful behavior. It's the easiest place to conform sexual indiscretions and shady concern dealings:

In Chapter ii, Tom takes Nick there to come across his mistress, Myrtle, and get to a political party at their apartment, where Tom has sex with her while Nick waits, and where Tom ends the evening by punching Myrtle in the face.

Gatsby takes Nick to Manhattan in Chapter 4 to have lunch with Meyer Wolfshiem, the gangster who fixed the World Series and who is Gatsby's business partner.

Finally, Gatsby, Nick, Daisy, Jordan, and Tom to go Manhattan in the explosive Chapter vii showdown where Daisy chooses Tom over Gatsby.

Partly this is because Manhattan is portrayed as a melting pot where a diversity of social classes, races, and backgrounds is par for the grade, and where unusual people don't really stand out. For instance, check out this passage where Nick and Gatsby are driving into the urban center:

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at the states with the tragic eyes and brusk upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's first-class auto was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven past a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a daughter. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

"Anything tin can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all. . . ."

Even Gatsby could happen, without whatever particular wonder. (4.55-58)

There are wealthy African-Americans, European immigrants, the living and the dead, all mixed together without a trouble. The city is awash in possibility, the "wild hope" that anything could happen there - "fifty-fifty Gatsby."

Also, misdeeds are easy to go away with in Manhattan because its size affords everyone enormous anonymity, which Nick loves:

I began to similar New York, the racy, adventurous experience of information technology at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless centre. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. (three.157)

On the other hand,Long Island is a much smaller, more insular community. Instead of shrugging off bearding misbehavior, the people on Long Island care securely about who their neighbors are and what they are doing. It's harder to comport affairs, shady business, or whatever else there without incurring the moral opprobrium of everyone else.

While Gatsby is unremarkable in Manhattan, in West Egg he becomes the focal betoken of unending rumors. People say he is related to Kaiser Willhelm (the ruler of Deutschland during WWI, and thus America's main enemy), that he is a German spy, and whatever number of other things:

Gatsby'due south notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accustomed his hospitality and then become regime on his by, had increased all summer until he fell but short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the "cloak-and-dagger pipage-line to Canada" attached themselves to him, and there was i persistent story that he didn't live in a house at all, only in a gunkhole that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. (6.5)

Similarly, Tom's affair with Myrtle benefits from its city setting, as Tom feels free to cheat on his married woman in public: "he turned upward in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a tabular array, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew" (ii.4). Meanwhile, when Daisy and Gatsby start their affair, Gatsby has to fire his entire household staff because he is worried that his servants will tell everyone what they've seen:

Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never went into Due west Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen... The grocery boy reported that the kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was that the new people weren't servants at all.

Next 24-hour interval Gatsby called me on the phone.

"Going abroad?" I inquired.

"No, erstwhile sport."

"I hear you lot fired all your servants."

"I wanted somebody who wouldn't gossip. (7. 9-14)

You tin see how rumor immediately spreads and is uncontainable in the shut circles of Long Island. Even despite all of Gatsby's precautions, Nick has already "heard" from someone else that Gatsby has fired all his servants.

This minute observation of ane's neighbors really differentiates the towns in Long Island from the large city of Manhattan.

The rumor mill fifty-fifty brings a reporter out to interview Gatsby in Chapter half dozen.

Westward Egg vs. Due east Egg

While very rich people live in both Eastward Egg and Westward Egg, the divergence is the kind of rich people live in each boondocks.

E Egg is for the quondam money crowd - people whose wealth is inherited, and who have been the upper chaff of society for generations. In contrast,Westward Egg is for the nouveau riche - self-made people who have become rich recently and who were originally born into working or middle-class families.

This ways that in generaleveryone from Due east Egg looks down on everyone from Due west Egg in order to demonstrate their superiority. (Nick is one of the exceptions: he lives in West Egg despite having the family background necessary to fit in in East Egg). At one of Gatsby'due south parties, Nick hangs out with an East Egg group who don't socialize with anyone else and who are conspicuously at that place to mock and exist appalled by the other party guests:

Jordan invited me to join her own party who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden...Instead of rambling this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and causeless to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside—Eastward Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety. (3.37)

This too ways that since they can't distinguish themselves through their wealth, East Egg residents rely on their improve understanding of the nuances and minutiae of manners and behavior to indicate that they are and then very far above their Due west Egg neighbors. Nosotros get the sense that every East Egg person is forever sending knowing looks at every other East Egg person every fourth dimension they run into someone from W Egg. For instance, check out Gatsby'southward run across with Tom'due south horseback riding friend Sloane and his woman friend, when Gatsby repeatedly puts his pes in his mouth:

Mr. Sloane didn't enter into the conversation but lounged back haughtily in his chair; the adult female said cypher either - until unexpectedly, subsequently 2 highballs, she became cordial.

"Nosotros'll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby," she suggested. "What do you say?"

"Certainly. I'd be delighted to take you." ...

"You come to supper with me," said the lady enthusiastically. "Both of you." ...

Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go and he didn't see that Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn't...

"My God, I believe the homo's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she doesn't want him?"

"She says she does want him." ...

Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted their horses.

"Come on," said Mr. Sloane to Tom, "nosotros're late. We've got to go." And then to me: "Tell him we couldn't expect, will you?"

Tom and I shook easily, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod and they trotted quickly downwards the drive, disappearing under the August leafage merely every bit Gatsby with lid and calorie-free overcoat in hand came out the front door. (half-dozen.38-59)

Gatsby, the quintessential West Egg-er, tin can't tell that the woman doesn't want him to come up to her political party. He is even less able to run across that Sloane really doesn't want him to come up. And he doesn't seem to sense how rude they are existence to him - something which Tom and Nick choice up on immediately.

This social cluelessness and lack of social adroitness translate into the style with which Gatsby lives his life. He spends enormous sums of money, just with every buy, he is always showing that he is new to the moneyed scene. Let's see how this plays out in his house.

Gatsby's Mansion vs. Daisy and Tom's Mansion

The differences between old money and new coin are reflected primarily by differences in style, aesthetics, and taste.

Gatsby typifies the ostentatious, over-the-superlative conspicuous consumption of those whose wealth is new and and so must be always on brandish:

I lived at Due west Egg, the—well, the less stylish of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the baroque and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, but fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thou a flavor. The i on my correct was a jumbo affair past whatever standard—it was a factual fake of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. (1.fourteen)

His house is a reproduction of French chateau. This is ridiculous both because this French design is out of place in America, and too because information technology is a visibly brand new edifice trying to replicate something that would be centuries onetime. It'south completely ludicrous, and it is telling that the simply person who has the desired response to this mansion is Gatsby's father:

It was a photo of the business firm, cracked in the corners and muddy with many hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. "Look there!" so sought admiration from my optics. (9.102)

Gatsby'due south father has the same taste equally Gatsby - the appreciation of a poor person for the trappings of wealth.

Meanwhile, Daisy and Tom live in a house that is also extravagant, but i that has its luxury somewhat concealed:

Their house was even more than elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when information technology reached the house globe-trotting up the side in bright vines every bit though from the momentum of its run. The front end was broken past a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gilt, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon (1.18)

The windows were ajar and gleaming white confronting the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little style into the house. A cakewalk blew through the room, blew curtains in at 1 terminate and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding block of the ceiling—and and so rippled over the wine-colored rug (1.26)

The business firm is much more fit for its location - Georgian Colonial is an architectural style that is appropriate to America (as its proper noun suggests, it came from England during the colonial period).

The clarification also confirms the permanence of the Buchanans' mansion. Gatsby'due south house is fighting with its surroundings (information technology's off both in fourth dimension period, and it seems to be having a problem with the "raw" ivy). In contrast, Daisy and Tom's house is so much a function of the environment that the grass "seemed to abound a lilliputian mode into the house," blurring outside and inside just like the open windows that let the breeze blow through.

Information technology may not be too much to read some foreshadowing into these contrasting descriptions: Gatsby's house is too new and non rooted enough. Meanwhile, the place where Daisy and Tom live is securely embedded and seems unbreakable.

No one'due south pulling this thing out of the basis anytime soon.

The Valley of Ashes: Setting and Symbol

The Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby functions both every bit a literal place where the climactic consequence of the novel happens, and is also a powerful symbol – in other words, a concrete object that stands for an abstract thought connected to the novel's themes.

The Valley of Ashes is the name that Nick gives to an industrial neighborhood in Queens that the rich take to drive through on their way from the Eggs to Manhattan. This is where George Wilson has his gas station, and where Myrtle Wilson is run over and killed by Daisy. Suitably, information technology is a horribly bleak and drab place:

About half way between Westward Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs abreast it for a quarter of a mile, and so as to compress abroad from a certain desolate area of country. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who motion dimly and already aging through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of greyness cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to residual, and immediately the ash-grayness men swarm upward with leaden spades and stir up an bulletproof cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. (ii.one)

This is the place where those who cannot make it in the cutthroat world of East Declension capitalism end upward. It is as well the place propping upward much of that wealth through the production coming from the factories that are polluting the spot.

But the description that transforms the ash that covers everything from only being dust to a scary substance capable of creating otherworldly plans and people signals that this Valley of Ashes has rich symbolic meaning. For a detailed analysis of how this symbol functions within the peachy Gatsby, cheque out our articles on how to arroyo symbols in general and on the Valley of Ashes as a symbol in particular.

How to Write About The Great Gatsby Setting

So how do y'all use setting to create a compelling essay?

Pick a Topic

There are several means to go about finding your topic when tackling this kind of assignment. Here are some possibilities:

Close reading. Yous can focus on settings themselves, earthworks actually deeply into the description of ane, two, or more places or times in the novel to explore how word choice, similes, metaphors, and any other literary devices help the reader visualize location. For example, yous could trace the way the word "ash" appears in the novel, at kickoff defining The Valley of Ashes itself is a kind of fantastical alternate reality, and then spreading out toward the places of the privileged. You could focus on a literary device called metonymy, using a part to stand in for the whole, and explore why the novel chooses to focus on Dustin Ash as the representative aspect of this neighborhood.

Connection to character. Oft, setting is a fashion to define grapheme. If y'all write most this, your essay volition tease out the mutual qualities of a character and of the place most closely associated with that character. These will either be synergistic, with one amplifying the other, or else they will play as a contrast, undercutting the grapheme. In our case, for instance, Gatsby's mansion speaks volumes about how he sees himself and his money, and likewise about the vast gulf that separates him from the upper elite that he really wants to be function of. Conversely, Nick's pokey little house seems humble and unassuming, much similar Nick wants to project himself to be. But in reality, by being located side by side to obscenely luxurious mansions, the firm is only falsely small-scale, and shows off some of Nick's poorly disguised snobbery. (Read more about all the novel's characters in our overview commodity.)

Connection to theme. Similarly, setting can help clarify a novel's theme by providing a concrete example of an abstract idea. In the groovy Gatsby, you lot could focus on the way one or more than of the settings play into the failure of the American Dream, ane of this novel's most salient themes. One way to do this would exist to focus on the Valley of Ashes, the place where dreams come to die, both literally and figuratively. If the thought of the American dream is that through hard work anyone can become successful, so George Wilson's tragic fate, as exemplified through his garage and circumstances, serves to completely debunk this myth.

Create an Argument

It's not enough to just describe i of the novel's settings and explicate its possible connections to either graphic symbol or theme - or to compare and contrast information technology to another setting. Instead, y'all have to make sure that you're making some kind of point well-nigh why/how the setting functions in the novel as a whole.

How exercise you know if you're making an argument and not just maxim the obvious? If you can imagine someone arguing the opposite of what you're saying, then you lot've got an argument on your hands.

Once you lot've figured out what yous want to contend, kickoff small by analyzing chunks of the text where the symbol pops up, and so broadening your points out to the balance of the book. This way, your argument will exist strengthened past textual prove.

What's Next?

Learn how to write about the themesthat settings are ordinarily linked to.

Become help on other assignments by reading our guide on analyzing or comparing and contrasting characters.

Brush up on the context of these settingsin our summary of The Great Gatsby.

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About the Writer

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in loftier school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to go her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate nigh improving student access to higher education.