Charlotte’s Chronicle

Now that our study of the novel The Great Gatsby is wrapping up, a great debate has broken out over whether or not we should be allowed to watch the movie version as well. While movies and books may communicate a story differently, there are definite benefits to each that, when paired together, lead to an increase in overall comprehension of the viewers. Movies allow audiences to more easily visualize scenes from books that may have been unclear when they are being read, especially when those stories are written using complex and formal language such as in The Great Gatsby . Lines like “ No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”(Fitzgerald 96) can be hard to wrap your head around. However, hearing them spoken by an actor that has studied their meaning extensively in order to deliver them in the best way possible would make their meaning more understandable. Additionally, movies take much less time to complete so you can absorb the ove...

The story of the Great Gatsby contains lots of commentary on America during the 1920s and the negative effects wealth and status can have on a person. The main character Gatsby, one of the wealthiest men in the story, dies at the end of the story after being corrupted by his greed and ambition. Nick even describes the wealthy of the story as a “rotten crowd”, a word that implies decay and corruption (Fitzgerald 154). This story is only hypothetical, exaggerated to communicate a lesson. But what if there was a real life example of just how status can lead to corruption.  The radium girls lived in the 1930’s and like Gatsby, the wealth and status they accumulated ultimately led to their untimely deaths. The radium girls worked in factories, painting watch faces with radium paint to make them glow in the dark. After working with the paint for a while, the girls found that their skin and clothes were beginning to glow as well. Most would assume this abnormality would be cause for conce...