SOURCE: Kumamoto, Chikako D. “Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.” Explicator 60, no. 1 (fall 2001): 37-41.

In the following essay, Kumamoto explores Fitzgerald's use of the “egg and chicken” metaphors as part of Gatsby's structure.

Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby

Having moved to the suburbs of New York City, Nick Carraway makes the now-famous comparison between his neighborhood and its adjacent community: “Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy of bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great barnyard of Long Island Sound” (Fitzgerald 9).

One may inquire, however, whether Nick means the egg metaphor simply as a felicitous coincidence or as a surreptitious carrier of his narrative thesis. Among theme-clarifying studies of Fitzgerald's major images in the novel—studies by Lehan, Geismer, Johnson, Laying, Miller, and Sutton, for instance—only Kermit...