The word "accidental" recalls the automobile accidents in the novel-in part, Gatsby is a victim of such an accident-and the apparent arbitrariness of human life (to which Gatsby's love for Daisy has ...failed, for the reader at least, to add any meaning). "Transept" has a specific denotation (which, in the context of this scene, would be entirely metaphorical), namely "the part of a cruciform church that crosses at right angles to the greatest length between the nave and the apse or choir," or "either of the projecting ends of a transept" ("Transept"), whereas "transit" is a vague term but one that serves to preclude any confusion of the part of the reader that it is describing the leg of Gatsby's corpse.
In "Native Speaker", Chang-rae Lee presents the larger immigrant population of New York City as connected by the shared experiences of social and political marginalization and economic exploitation. ...To underscore this diminishment of immigrants and ethnic minorities to insubstantial nobodies, obscured beneath a sooty veneer by national discourses that ignore or erase them, Lee appropriates ash imagery from F. Scott Fitzgerald's quintessentially American novel "The Great Gatsby" (1925). Many general comparisons have been drawn between Lee's first novel and Fitzgerald's classic by reviewers and scholars alike: Henry as the Carraway-esque narrator seduced by the grand proportions (in Henry's view, for a Korean immigrant) of Kwang's desire and of his rise and fall; the shared themes of the self-made man, of the unfulfilled, hollow American Dream, of overreaching.
...not so widely noted is the fact that "Babylon Revisited" also echoes material from an earlier novel, Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby. ...teachers and students can benefit from examining ...the short story not only as a great work in its own right, but also for the light it sheds on other works in the Fitzgerald canon. In "Babylon," the decadent behavior of Charlie and other Americans in Paris during the late 1920s stems from the fact that the stock market boom allowed them to stop working and instead live off their stock dividends (626). ...in both works the idea of accumulating money the "wrong" way is part of the reason the protagonist is unable to achieve his dreams. ...as the confrontation scene in Gatsby winds down, Gatsby tries to talk to Daisy, who is wearing a white dress, but finds her "drawing further and further into herself," leaving him with only the "dead dream . . . trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling . . . toward that lost voice across the room" (142).
