Readers’ Interpretation and Recontextualization of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Abstract

Readers’ Interpretation and Recontextualization of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The objectives of the study are to know Daisy’s love to Tom and Gatsby through readers’ interpretation  and recontextualization of The Great Gatsby in order to reveal the construction of the interactional positioning of the readers.

The method employed is field work by observing the students’ interpretation of the topic. The main theme is taken from the novel which is then formulated in the questions to be discussed by 5 (five) out of twenty students or respondents of the novel text. The result is the production of a number of utterances to interpret the textual data of the novel. It is these utterances or the talk of the students that are taken to be the sources of data. The utterances produced are analyzed and reinterpreted.

The results of the analysis are that there occurs indexical effect of the novel on the real readers, or in the interactional positionings of the readers. Using functional semiotics to analyze the readers’ utterances, the data are considered analyzed at three distinct but interconnected textual levels: denotational text, meditational text, and interactional text. Through this analysis, it is found that the novel has an idexical effect on grouping the readers into two. The social relations that are constructed in the novel between Daisy and Gatsby and Tom, for example, is transferred into the social relations between real readers symbolized by pure love vs. fake love. This is the creation of interactional positioning.

Key words: Reader response, interpretation, indexical semiotic,  denotational text, mediational text and interactional  text.