Close Reading Example

EClose Reading Example in Fitzgerald

The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch (Fitzgerald 6).

The vast lawn’s “run,” from the East Egg shoreline toward the imposing Buchanan mansion, mimics a run by a football star who scores a touchdown, sprinting the length of the field. The run is panoramic, as Nick’s eye - camera-like - tracks details of the adventurous course. The personified lawn surmounts obstacles in its path, “jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens,” in much the same way that a football hero (Tom Buchanan was a fabled end at Yale, recipient of touchdown passes) might hurdle past defenders on his way to a goal-line. As the lawn reaches the mansion, the green sprawls “up the side” of the house “in bright vines,” as if the forward motion of the run cannot be contained. In one sense, Nick fulfills his football metaphor, comparing the merger of grass-unto-vines to a runner’s crash into the end-zone, merging with the crowd. In another sense, however, Nick curtails the lawn’s advance by noting that it hits the solid, ivy-covered mansion. Here the running lawn retires into a staid domesticity, evoking nostalgia for its bygone days on the field, just as Tom is an Ivy League football legend, for whom “everything afterward savors of anticlimax” (6). As Nick’s gaze shifts to the mansion’s owner, alone on the veranda, “his legs apart,” the view of Tom Buchanan is enlarged thanks to the alert narrator’s playful conflation of Tom’s past and present lives. Nick demurely suppresses what he knows about Tom’s impending brutality, dwelling instead on the “reflected gold” of Tom’s illustrious past, and on the aura of Tom’s unfathomable wealth today, reflected in golden light that “glows” from the mansion windows. ~ PRB