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Spring on the outside, winter on the inside

"Okay, let's see now. Winterbourne and Daisy carry associations of winter--death, cold--and spring--life, flowers, renewal--that ultimately come into conflict...with winter's frost destroying the delicate young flower." (19)

When I read this quote, I automatically tried to relate this back to The Great Gatsby, obviously because one of the main characters is named Daisy. I couldn't agree more that a name like Daisy carries with it connotations of spring and vibrancy and renewal; you don't even have to know much about literary analysis to make that association because it happens subconsciously. It's interesting that the Daisy of The Great Gatsby is not really the vibrant person full of life that her name suggests. She maintains an appearance of being bright and vivacious, but in reality she is very unhappy and cynical about the world. This is in keeping with my theory that all of these characters are maintaining a facade that is very contradictory to their internal selves (I go into more detail about that here.
It is a nice ironic effect that Daisy only reflects the connotations of her name in appearance but in reality goes against them entirely. This book is definitely useful in helping me pick up on things like that; while some of these concepts may seem obvious, it is very helpful to have a reference tool like this book to call my attention to details I might otherwise read over without giving a lot of thought.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on January 29, 2009 9:59 PM.

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