Julia Zielinski
English 3 Period 10
04/07/2018
First Chapter of a Journey
The beginning of every story is the build up of the entirety of the rest of the story. If the reader of the Great Gatsby pays close attention to the beginning chapter or even goes back to the first chapter once finished with the book, the reader can realize that the entirety of the first chapter and even the little poem of the epilogue generally summarized the whole story line and the theme that occurs throughout this book. Fitzgerald starts up the first chapter by introducing our main narrator, Nick Carraway. Before anyone even begins a story, the readers are forced to trust the main character in which they must believe everything they have said…show more content… Fitzgerald delves into Nick’s past; how much of an educated man he was. He even goes as far to state that he “graduated from New Haven in 1915”(3), Yale, to further increase our faith in our narrator. Now that Fitzgerald has made the audience have faith in our narrator, he begins to give us an introduction to most of the characters and how they will be displayed throughout Nick’s point of view. As the audience gets a glimpse of the characters, Nick starts off by stating that Tom, Nick’s best friend in college who also happened to be Nick’s cousin’s husband, as just “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors anticlimax”, which makes the audience infer that whatever events occur that link to Tom, is a way of him trying to make himself at that same level of greatness he was when he was twenty-one. Nick then starts to begin to paint the readers a picture of beauty as he begins to describe his cousin, Daisy, and Jordan Baker. He states that, “they were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house”(8). This paints the picture of how beautiful
