Inevitably Irish: From West Egg to NYU

 

One of the things I did this summer was start reading what I’ll loosely term here as “modern American classics”. I started with The Great Gatsby, followed with Slaughterhouse Five, and then moved onto The Grapes of Wrath. [1]

I did this because I wanted to be able to hold conversations about literature with other American students. Books of this ilk are assigned reading for American high school students.

As an Irish teenager recently transplanted into lower Manhattan, and attending college with 20,000 other undergraduates, I found one aspect of The Great Gatsby to be particularly resonant. 

In The Great Gatsby, Nick (the narrator) is writing about New York life as a foreigner to the city. Everything in the novel is inexorably affected by the Midwestern lens Nick sees things through, with all its inherent traditional morality. He is an alien to the fast-paced lifestyle and decadent parties that he meets in West Egg. 

I can’t help but relate to Nick when I write this blog, given that I’m also a transplant to NYC and a helpless victim of my own lens. Of course, all writers are subject to their own bias and subjectivity, and I have yet to ferret out the immorality and decadence that Nick found, but I think moving from a slow, conservative, somewhat introspective town in Ireland to the ultra-liberal, outgoing NYC is a jump similar in nature to Nick Carraway’s.

Recognizing one’s bias doesn’t actually go too far in mitigating it, and I think this blog will always be characterized by its inevitable Irish perspective. I don’t want to keep coming back to that Irishness, though — I think it’s a pretty narrow niche to peddle. All the same, I feel it’s interesting, and important, to take note of it. 

 [1] As always, you can check my Reading Log to see what I'm reading, and I keep a separate GoodReads shelf with titles I read specifically for college.

Photo: Washington Square Park.