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Playlist The Great Gatsby: Shmoopversations 16 videos
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The Great Gatsby Part 6: Eternal Graceless Circles 58414 Views
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Description:
Gatsby’s a man who throws huge parties and still has zero friends. Maybe they’re all like...Tupperware parties or something. Check out the video to learn more about Gatsby and his boring Tupperware parties.
Transcript
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:05
The Great Gatsby
- 00:07
Eternal Graceless Circles
- 00:10
a la Shmoop
- 00:13
Another great turn of phrase from Fitzgerald:
Full Transcript
- 00:15
"eternal graceless circles."
- 00:19
So, once again, we've got more parties on the horizon.
- 00:21
And this time, instead of focusing on all the juicy gossip,
- 00:24
let's talk about how Fitzgerald describes
- 00:26
the parties themselves.
- 00:28
The word "lavish"
- 00:30
has to be in our lexicon here.
- 00:34
How should we interpret the lush descriptions of Gatsby's parties?
- 00:39
Give us the sense for what
- 00:41
the domain is of parties
- 00:44
and how the power dynamics and the emptiness dynamics sort of play together.
- 00:48
The emptiness dynamic is the biggest one there, right?
- 00:51
Gatsby doesn't know anyone at his parties.
- 00:57
At one point, there's a party
- 00:58
that Nick is the only invited guest.
- 01:01
Everyone else just shows up.
- 01:02
[ crowd chattering ]
- 01:05
Gatsby does not have friends.
- 01:07
He manages to get hundreds of people to his house to party,
- 01:09
but he doesn't know any of them.
- 01:11
Imagine a bunch of strangers coming to your house.
- 01:14
That sounds terrible.
- 01:16
So that shows the emptiness.
- 01:18
We also get descriptions --
- 01:20
At one of the first parties he throws,
- 01:23
there's this guy, the owl-eyed man,
- 01:25
who is in Gatsby's library.
- 01:27
And he pulls out a book from Gatsby's shelf.
- 01:30
And he is shocked to see that it is a real book,
- 01:33
because he assumed that it was just for show.
- 01:36
He was like, "Oh, these books must just be for show.
- 01:39
They can't be real, because everything's a facade."
- 01:42
So he's shocked to see that they're real books, but then
- 01:45
he looks a little closer and sees that they're
- 01:47
uncut, which means that Gatsby hasn't read them.
- 01:50
So books used to come where you'd have to actually cut the pages open
- 01:53
before you read them. So they were uncut,
- 01:55
which means, yes they're real books,
- 01:57
but Gatsby has not actually read them.
- 01:59
So even though the owl-eyed man is surprised to see,
- 02:03
"Oh, it's not all a facade!"
- 02:05
then he stops and, "Oh, yeah, no, it is,
- 02:06
because he hasn't read these."
- 02:07
So basically the description
- 02:10
of the parties is all about showing how
- 02:11
superficial it all really is.
- 02:15
[ whoop ]
- 02:16
How should we interpret the lush descriptions of Gatsby's parties?
- 02:23
[ whistling ] [ bang ] [ scream ]
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