Eleven pages in, I can already tell that The Great Gatsby will be much more enjoyable than The House of Mirth. First, I much prefer the first person point of view that Fitzgerald employs as opposed to Wharton's distant, unknown third-person narrator. First-person narration allows me to better immerse myself within the story and relate more closely to the characters. Secondly, the narrator and I'm assuming protagonist of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, is a down-to-earth, tolerant, scholarly man that promises to embody all the qualities that I hoped Lily Bart would adopt in The House of Mirth. Furthermore, Nick thirsts for knowledge and yearns to be a renaissance man, which is evidenced when Nick recounts, " . . . I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man'" (Fitzgerald 4). I admire both of these qualities in Nick; they show that Nick has high goals for himself and the ambition to achieve them. Also, Nick narrates from the perspective of a middle-class, working man and thus demonstrates considerably less arrogance and superficiality, two extremely vexing traits. Finally, Fitzgerald writes in a simpler style than Wharton, or at least it seems so at this juncture. This simplification of style allows me to enjoy the novel more instead of going over passages several times to ensure I understood them correctly. At times, Wharton's style came off as unnecessarily convoluted and pretentious to me. Perhaps she wrote that way to reinforce the attitudes of her characters, but that does not make the style any less irritating. Regardless, I am excited to continue this second novel and discover what makes Gatsby so great.
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