ABSTRACT
In this chapter I conduct my own cognitive stylistic analysis of the closing lines of The Great Gatsby. Afterwards, I discuss the outcome of my analysis and compare it to some of the reader response data from the previous two chapters to look for similarities and differences. My analysis is simply about how I as an individual, avid reader, believe I read this text. My focus will be on how cognitive linguistic phenomena like image schemata and space grammar can be employed as a method of analysing literary discourse. Because there is no existing methodological framework to follow, I will be constructing my own way of schematically representing how I read in embodied image-schematic terms. In this chapter, I will try to show how readers such as myself, might draw on style-based inferences when reading the closing lines of a muchenjoyed novel. These are inferences that are grounded in previous, embodied, experiences of reading at closure. This mode of reading applies core aspects of the theoretical model of affective reading that I described in Chapter 7 of this book. One of the claims from that model is that highly abstract “memories” of affective linguistic/stylistic structures exist pre-conceptually in the non-reading phase, which can become activated by numerous activities such as those discussed in Chapter 4 on mood when one is approaching the end of a much-enjoyed novel.
