Last night George Wilson grieved over the loss of his wife, Myrtle Wilson, who ran onto a road in the Valley of Ashes and was struck by a car, losing her life.
Mavro Michaelis, a good friend of George Wilson's, had this to say "She rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting." (Fitzgerald 130) It caught Michaelis' attention but "before he could move from his door, the business was over." (Fitzgerald 130)As she blindly ran into the street like a madwoman, she was struck and instantly killed by the 'death car.' (Fitzgerald 131)"Michaelis and another man reached her first, but when they had torn open her shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath." (Fitzgerald 131)Michaelis described the deceased's face by saying "the mouth was wide open and ripped a little at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long."
(Fitzgerald 131)A man who was present at the scene of the crime said that "it was a yellow car, the car passed me down the road going faster than forty. Going fifty, sixty." (Fitzgerald 133)When Wilson learned of the car that had killed his beloved wife, his emotional state became further deranged. Alex Goodall, a neighbour, had this to say: "He grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He announced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow car belonged to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his wife had come from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen." (Fitzgerald 149)"Her and her husband were having some sort of...
Woman Dies a Brutal Death in the Valley of Ashes - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald -write a news report on one of the major incidences in The Great Gatsby
This essay relies too heavily on quotations from "The Great Gatsby," mistaking F. Scott Fitzgerald's highly stylized writing for something that has verisimilitude -- the ring of truth -- as part of a news report.
First of all, the Valley of Ashes is a phrase that Nick Carraway uses, not a formal designation. The writer should have introduced it in the same way that Carraway does early in the novel, as a nondescript place known by some in the area as the Valley of Ashes, somewhere between the Astoria Bridge and the more affluent suburbs of East Egg and West Egg on Long Island.
The article frequently attributes to characters material that is part of Fitzgerald's narrative. Michaelis did not say Myrtle ran into the dusk waving and shouting. That is Fitzgerald's description, and given the limited dialog that Fitzgerald does give the Greek, it seems unlikely that he would use such expressions. This is even more clear with the description of what the men found on reaching Myrtle Wilson's body. What Fitzgerald has written is not what these men would have said, to a reporter or anyone else. Nor would Michaelis have used the phrase "tremendous vitality."
The essay is also inaccurate. The description of the car as yellow and moving at a speed of more than forty miles per hour was not given by a bystander but by a motorist going the other way, toward New York.
The description of George Wilson's mood changes is again presented as a quotation rather than narrative. It does not sound like something a person would say. It sound like something that a very sophisticated writer would write, and it does not fit into a newspaper piece.
Finally, Myrtle Wilson as a Mormon? Whatever prompted this writer to suggest that Wilson had any connection to the Church of Latter-Day Saints -- the Mormons? When Michaelis began asking about churches, Wilson apparently never went to a church, and to suggest that Myrtle would be buried in a Mormon church strains believability.
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