Thursday, June 27, 2013

Describe the Buchanans' house in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby?

The mansion owned by Tom and Daisy Buchanan is aptly described in the very first chapter of The Great Gatsby as Nick, the narrator, visits it for the first time:



 "Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay" (6).



This description is quite extraordinary, considering that on the previous page Nick describes the typical homes in East Egg to be nothing less than palaces.  One must assume, then, that Tom and Daisy's home was even more dazzling than most. 



"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" (7). 



When one considers the vast amount of land on Long Island that the Buchanan mansion alone encompasses, that in itself is quite a monetary feet (even for the time):



 "The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy evening" (8). 



Fitzgerald couldn't end Nick's description without pandering to the staggering wealth of the roaring twenties.  Even the Buchanans' home "reflected gold" in more ways than one.  There is no better inhabitant for this glittering place than Daisy, as Fitzgerald's novel will go on to prove.

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