In the following excerpt, Samuels describes Fitzgerald's two great achievements in The Great Gatsby: the "triumph of language" and his creation of the book's narrator, Nick Carraway.
[The Great Gatsby's] fundamental achievement is a triumph of language.
I do not speak merely of the "flowers," the famous passages: Nick's description of Gatsby yearning toward the green light on Daisy's dock, Gatsby's remark that the Buchanans' love is "only personal," the book's last page. Throughout, The Great Gatsby has the precision and splendor of a lyric poem, yet well-wrought prose is merely one of its triumphs. Fitzgerald's distinction in this novel is to have made language celebrate itself. Among other things, The Great Gatsby is about the power of art.
This celebration of literary art is inseparable from the novel's second great.....
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