Saturday 22 January 2011

Themes and ideas around relationships in Captain Corelli's Mandolin and The Great Gatsby for AO3

Themes and ideas which connect the novels




The theme of relationships and its sub themes


Remember that when you select appropriate chapters and passages from these chapters you need to focus on relationships which confront readers with powerful emotions!  Consider emotive climaxes or passages in which characters reflect on events in which emotions are running high.
  • honour/dishonour
  • education (Tom and Nick - New Haven (Yale - like a club/status and self education for Dr Iannis/Pelagia and Mandras
  • cynicism and shallowness - maintained in conversations early in Gatsby
  • education
  • various forms of love and friendship
  • music and having fun
  • betrayal and deceit
  • the high moral tone of both Carraway and de Bernieres’s third person narrator
  • the position of women
  • communities
  • change and characters. Nick Carraway develops and changes as he approaches 30 and uses different symbols.
  • writing
  • waste - Correlli’s and Pelagia’s relationship/ Gatsby and Daisy’s. Unfulfilled relationships. Whether Daisy was worth what Gatsby was prepared to do for her.
  • death and loss
  • wealth and deprivation and the effects of each
  • idealism and materialism and how they affect characters
  • patriotism
  • gangsterism/  death from outside: Hitler/
  • geography of place
  • the mystique of the eponymous characters
  • the narrators who admire and describe them.
  • modernism and post modernism.
  • what others have you noticed?

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About Me

I teach Film, Media and English Lit.