In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. 

Fitzgerald paints Nick to be a person with no personal judgements but he further yet says that there is a line that no judgements shall come into play but if that line is passed he may have his own judgements. He is given the quality of what Fitzgerald says is a “Politician” because he knows all the secrets of “wild, unknown men” but he has hidden them from the rest.

Fitzgerald uses emotive language as he writes about Nick to show the way he felt about himself as a person which can introduce himself to us and what his personality is. Fitzgerald also uses verbs to show how Nick acts upon thing.

other language features could be: Connotative language, metaphor, sentence structures, assonance, juxtaposition, verbs, simile.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Category

Homework