Tag: Crime

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Scribner, 2004.

 

Summary of Work
Nick Carraway moves to New York City to work in bonds, and takes a small home in the West Egg countryside just outside of town. His cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan live in East Egg, and through them he meets golfer Jordan Baker. They are rich and live a lavish and carefree lifestyle. Tom is known for being a philanderer, and so they have had to move a lot when the scandals come out. Carraway meets Tom’s current mistress in a social outing, and sees firsthand the lavish and ridiculous lifestyle Tom lives. While Carraway is going in between work and social engagements, he sees his mysterious neighbor who hosts fancy parties every Saturday, Mr. Jay Gatsby. No one knows quite what Gatsby does or who he is, but many famous people show up to his lavish parties, where food, liquor, and entertainment are in never-ending supply.

He is invited over to Gatsby’s house for a party one weekend, and overwhelmed by the lavishness, he latches onto Jordan Baker so he can take in the party. He unknowingly meets Gatsby, and Gatsby has a private meeting with Jordan. Soon after, Gatsby takes Carraway to lunch, and tells him a bit about himself and that he has a favor to ask of him that Miss Baker will do for him, introduces him to Meyer Wolfsheim, the gambler and bootlegger, and then runs off when Tom Buchanan enters and starts talking to Carraway. Afterwards, he has tea with Jordan and discovers that Gatsby would like to have Carraway have Daisy to tea and allow him to attend. He determines he will do it, and Gatsby awkwardly offers Carraway work for easy money, but knowing that it is because of the service he is rendering, he refuses the work.

Gatsby meets Daisy and their love is rekindled—they had met before the war and before Daisy had married Tom. Gatsby, aka James Gatz, was penniless and unable to support her lifestyle, and he had been denied his inheritance from one Mr. Cody, who he had worked for sailing for five years before the War. The affair quickly heats up. She and Tom come to one of his parties, but she dislikes it, so he never has a party again. He fires his staff and hires new ones that Wolfsheim recommends, people who will keep quiet about the affair. Daisy comes over on the afternoons. Gatsby concocts a plan to get Daisy to tell Tom she never loved him and to leave her husband and marry him. She invites Gatsby over to lunch at her place so the conversation can occur, but she gets nervous and insists they go to town. It is during this lunch that Tom realizes she loves Gatsby, and also insists they go into town. Tom drives Gatsby’s car and Daisy and Gatsby drive Tom’s car. Tom stops for gas at Wilson’s (his mistress’s husband’s place), and learns that Wilson has discovered his wife’s unfaithfulness and is going to move them West to get away. Tom is even more desperate, about to lose his wife and mistress in one day.

They go to a hotel room near Central Park, where a fight breaks out and Daisy cannot state that she never loved Tom, breaking Gatsby’s heart. It also comes out that Gatsby is a bootlegger. Daisy decides she wants to leave, and Gatsby lets her drive home. Mrs. Wilson, thinking the yellow car is Tom, runs out into the street and Daisy hits her and kills her, driving off without stopping. Tom is devastated when he sees the scene as they drive back in his car. The next day, Tom tells Mr. Wilson who owned the yellow car in order to save his own life, and Wilson goes and kills Gatsby, and Daisy and Tom leave town. The only people to attend Gatsby’s funeral are a few servants, Carraway, and Gatsby’s father. Carraway can’t stand the East after that, and so breaks off his relationship with Jordan Baker and heads back home to the Midwest.

 

Brief Note On Themes
Set in the 1920s during Prohibition, this novel deals heavily with the spectacle and lavish living of rich whites during the time period. The work provides a commentary on how empty and careless the upper social classes are. It also explores he ideal of the American Dream, finding it to be hollow. The green light at the end of the dock could be said to represent the dreams of success, acceptance, and love that are ever unattainable and almost unreal in nature. Social status is explored as the discussion of people who live in East Egg versus West Egg are always apparent, showing the split between old money and new money. The whole area and social feuding are contrasted by the desolation of the space between the two Eggs and the city: a desolate and trashy waste space where the poor live and work. Above them loom the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg on a billboard, which overlook the moral degradation of those who live there and those who pass through the space between city and countryside.

by bluesyjune

C.D. Wright, One Big Self

Wright, C.D. One Big Self. Copper Canyon P., 2007.

Summary of Work
C.D. Wright’s “One Big Self” explores the lives of people in three different prisons in Louisiana. Wright suggests that when we look at all the prisons in America—and the prison population, which is the largest in the world—we are looking in a mirror at America’s values and legacy. What makes up the prison population outside of the numbers and the listed crime or law broken? Invited by her colleague and friend to go to learn about the inmates while her friend is taking pictures of the prison inmates for a larger project, Wright sets out to learn about the inmates and their lives, both before prison, during their crimes and trials, and life in prison. She also contemplates what prisons do to the environments and communities they inhabit. She shows that these inmates are more than just numbers, they are people who have dealt with many difficult circumstances: poverty, difficult family situations, poor education and no job opportunities available, relationship woes, and more.

One of the main things I noticed highlighted was the difference in experience for men and women in prison. There was a large focus on women in context of their children, children they have before they go to prison, children they have while in prison, and what happens to their relationships with their children; there is even a poem describing the process of getting ready for an Easter party with the children in the main area of the prison. With the men, the focus is much more on their experiences in prison or getting to prison rather than on families. When children are mentioned, it is in context of the ages that they meet and where the children end up, usually in prison like their fathers.

 

Brief Note on Themes
The overarching theme of the work is incarceration; how does the American prison system function? Who are the people in the system? Since the makeup of the majority of the population is black males and black people overall, what does that say about who we incarcerate or crime? How does the prison system affect the communities in which they are built? How does it save or ruin city economies? What are the reasons people invest in such systems, especially private prison systems, and how does having prison on the stock market change the system as people view it, use it, and strive for its expansion and continuation? Wright’s work largely reflects upon what it means to look at people solely for their crimes when they are much more than that, and what that says about the American justice and incarceration system.

 

Brief Note on Poetic Structure
Written in a free form, the work is a mix of what would seem like prose, followed by poetry that utilizes caesura, line breaks, and plenty of white space to cue readers to changes in scene, narrator, situation, and discussion. The structure takes a minimalist attitude, where the situations are given in pieces rather than as one continuous narrative. The breaks in narrative and the mix of prisoners names, only ever briefly mentioned, give a sense of “everyman” for the prisoners, rendering both their invisibility and individuality clear to the reader. Certain phrases or poetic repetitive structures, such as the “Count the . . .” poems which are brought back within other poems, work to remind readers of the controlling situation in which the prisoners live.

by bluesyjune