From The Student Room

TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > English > Quotes from The Limits of Wonder - Richard Lehan

Page 30 "When one lost that sense of life or promise...then life lost its sense of wonder, its splendor, its romantic promise."

Page 31 "It is Gatsby who endows her [Daisy] with a meaning that she could in no way embody."

Page 32 "God has withdrawn from this world and is replaced by the commercial billboard with the blind eyes of T.J.Eckleburg..."

Page 33 "This is a blind world because there is no source of moral vision"

Page 38 "Modern man not only loses God, but he loses the means of finding a substitute for God, by which Fitzgerald meant the means of incarnating his life with a sense of wonder."

Page 50 "Behind the idea of the East is a sense of fixed money, of institutional power, of class differences, of the anonymity of the megalopolis. Behind the idea of the West is a sense of mobility, of new opportunity, of a personal and human scale."

Page 72 "'The whole idea of Gatsby', Fitzgerald said, 'is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it.'"

Page 73 "Gatsby is reclaimed by the living dead, by George Wilson, the agent of the valley of ashes as well as the agent of Gatsby's death."

Page 74 "Daisy's very name suggests something perishable"

Page 84 "...Faustian man find himself longing for the unattainable; has no sense of his limits......While Faustian man lingers into the modern, he is transformed by the Enlightenment, which brings with it a sense of the empirical and the need for quantitative measurement. Under such influence, the sense of the infinite gives way to cold reason, science, and technology."

Page 101 "Nick realizes that romantic expectation, no matter how intensely conceived, cannot function independently of social reality."

Page 103 "ultimately the moral center - like so much that is seen in this novel - comes to us slightly blurred."

Page 109 "he [Nick] leaves us with...the nowhere hero, the Gatsby figure who stands between a dead past and an unrealizable future."

Page 110 "In Gatsby Fitzgerald showed a certain cultural materialism (embodied in Tom Buchanan) exhausting a romantic energy (embodied in Gatsby) leaving us a physical residue (embodied by George and Myrtle Wilson and the Valley of Ashes).

Page 123 "[Wilson] tells us, 'God sees everything', and then proceeds to kill the wrong person."

Page 123 "The [moral] center cannot hold, and romantic possibility gives way to a corrupt reality."

Comments