Update output_topic_details.txt

output_topic_details.txt

@@ -883,4 +883,14 @@ Love and Marriage
 The ideals of love and marriage are profoundly strained in The Great Gatsby, a book that centers on two loveless marriages: the union between Tom and Daisy Buchanan and between George and Myrtle Wilson. In both cases, the marriages seem to be unions of convenience or advantage than actual love. Myrtle explains that she married George because she thought he was “a gentleman,” suggesting she hoped he’d raise her class status. Daisy nearly backed out of her marriage to Tom the day before her wedding, and Tom had an affair within a year of the wedding, but the couple is well-suited because of their shared class and desire for fun and material possessions. Even Gatsby’s all-consuming passion for Daisy seems more of a desire to possess something unattainable than actual love. Nick, meanwhile, dates Jordan Baker throughout the book, and though their relationship has its moments of warmth and kindness, both parties generally seem lukewarm and emotionally distant. “I wasn’t actually in love,” Nick recalls, “but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.” Such “tender curiosity” may be the closest thing to love in the entire novel.
 
 Daisy’s passive role in Gatsby’s death signals a broader, more abstract antagonist that also haunts the novel: the American Dream of upward mobility. All of the characters in the book—even Nick, as he discloses in the opening pages—seek financial improvement in the hopes of securing a better life. Yet none of these characters achieves anything like happiness. Nick is the book’s most astute commentator on the illusory nature of the American Dream. On the novel’s final page, Nick specifically addresses what he considers the elusive nature of the American Dream. Even though hopeful dreaming like Gatsby’s seems to be oriented toward the future, Nick claims that such dreaming is stuck in the past. More specifically, he argues that the American Dream hearkens back to the time before America was even born, when it existed purely as an idea in some Dutch sailors’ minds. Nick’s point is that reality always falls short of the dream, and so striving to stay in the dream can just as easily lead one into a nightmare.
-Protagonist: Although Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby, and we only see things he witnesses or is told about, Jay Gatsby is the protagonist of the novel. In addition to lending his name to the book’s title, Gatsby also serves as the novel’s focal point. Gatsby’s quest to win back Daisy incites all the action of the book, as well as the tragic conclusion. Unlike Nick, who seems to not know what he wants, or else to not want more than to be an observer, Gatsby is clear and determined about his goal. From the moment he first kissed Daisy, Gatsby has aspired to attain her. This aspiration drives all his subsequent choices, and those choices in turn affect the other characters in the novel. Myrtle’s death, George’s suicide, and Gatsby’s murder are all the result of Gatsby’s quest to have Daisy for himself. Tom, Daisy, and Nick’s decisions to leave the east are also caused by Gatsby’s actions. Despite his power to change his life and the lives of others, Gatsby fails to attain his goal. He dies without having won Daisy back from Tom. In fact, we can infer that Gatsby’s presence in their lives served to draw the couple closer together – the exact opposite of what Gatsby wanted.
+Protagonist: Although Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby, and we only see things he witnesses or is told about, Jay Gatsby is the protagonist of the novel. In addition to lending his name to the book’s title, Gatsby also serves as the novel’s focal point. Gatsby’s quest to win back Daisy incites all the action of the book, as well as the tragic conclusion. Unlike Nick, who seems to not know what he wants, or else to not want more than to be an observer, Gatsby is clear and determined about his goal. From the moment he first kissed Daisy, Gatsby has aspired to attain her. This aspiration drives all his subsequent choices, and those choices in turn affect the other characters in the novel. Myrtle’s death, George’s suicide, and Gatsby’s murder are all the result of Gatsby’s quest to have Daisy for himself. Tom, Daisy, and Nick’s decisions to leave the east are also caused by Gatsby’s actions. Despite his power to change his life and the lives of others, Gatsby fails to attain his goal. He dies without having won Daisy back from Tom. In fact, we can infer that Gatsby’s presence in their lives served to draw the couple closer together – the exact opposite of what Gatsby wanted.
+Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
+
+The Green Light
+Situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn, the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in Chapter 1 he reaches toward it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal. Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal. In Chapter 9, Nick compares the green light to how America, rising out of the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation.
+
+The Valley of Ashes
+First introduced in Chapter 2, the valley of ashes between West Egg and New York City consists of a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes. It represents the moral and social decay that results from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as the rich indulge themselves with regard for nothing but their own pleasure. The valley of ashes also symbolizes the plight of the poor, like George Wilson, who live among the dirty ashes and lose their vitality as a result.
+
+The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg
+The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, bespectacled eyes painted on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes. They may represent God staring down upon and judging American society as a moral wasteland, though the novel never makes this point explicitly. Instead, throughout the novel, Fitzgerald suggests that symbols only have meaning because characters instill them with meaning. The connection between the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and God exists only in George Wilson’s grief-stricken mind. This lack of concrete significance contributes to the unsettling nature of the image. Thus, the eyes also come to represent the essential meaninglessness of the world and the arbitrariness of the mental process by which people invest objects with meaning. Nick explores these ideas in Chapter 8, when he imagines Gatsby’s final thoughts as a depressed consideration of the emptiness of symbols and dreams.