Monday

We need to look at the overview of the Modern Age in your textbooks, return to The Great Gatsby and discuss chapter 1 and give your some time to work on the chapter questions below.

 

 

THE GREAT GATSBY STUDY QUESTIONS 

 

Chapter I

1. How does Nick describe himself at the beginning of the book?
2. Why has Nick come to the East?
3. How does Nick describe Tom Buchanan?
4. Who is Jordan Baker? What does Nick find appealing about her?
5. How does Daisy react to the phone calls from Tom’s woman in New York?? 6. What is Gatsby doing when Nick first sees him?
7. Notice how many times Fitzgerald uses the words hope, or dream. Why does he do this?
8. Nick starts the novel by relaying his father's advice "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." Does he reserve judgment in the novel?
9. Pay attention to time. What is the day and year during the first scene at Daisy's house?
10. Describe Nick. What facts do you know about him, and what do you infer about him? What kind of a narrator do you think he will be?
11. What image does the author use to describe Jordan Baker? What does it mean? 12. How does Nick react to Jordan?
13. What does Tom's behavior reveal about his character?

NOTES:

Nick Carraway – (narrator), claims to be non-judgmental and this has made him “privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.”

Is from the West and moved to the East.  His family is in the hardware business.  He claims that he is descended from the “Dukes of Buccleuch” (look this up).

He is descended or claims to be descended from aristocracy.  His family is probably upper-middle class.  He works for a living. 

Was in World War I (The Great War).  Graduate from YALE (New Haven).  He works selling bonds.

Nick seems to be a reliable narrator but he does have moments.

“Midas, Morgan, and Maecenas” (page 4) – allusion (look up).

Eggs – West Egg and East Egg (these are in the Long Island Sound).  There is the egg in the Columbus Story (Columbus story).

Birth – the idea of infinite possibilities, dreams.  Before the egg is hatched anything can happen.

Setting: East and West Egg; June 7^th 1922. 

Tom: Yale – extremely rich (he inherited).  Played football – “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven – a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” 

“They had spent a year in France for no particular reason and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

  “I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”

Tom Buchanan – has a girl in New York (she’ll be important) and is a racist. 

Daisy “Fay” Buchanan – “there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.” 

From Louisville, the South.  She is from a rich aristocracy (a south family that probably owed a plantation). 

Jordan Baker – golf player.  From Louisville.  Single – symbol of the “new” woman of the 1920s.  Has a male name.  Foreshadow: Nick remembers a “critical, unpleasant story” about Jordan that he heard somewhere.

Jay Gatsby – at the end reaching out his had for the green light.

“No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interested in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” 

Myrtle Wilson (Tom’s girl). 

The theme of repeating the past is prevalent - for the men - in this chapter.

1) Nick talks about being restless after returning from WWI. "I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe -- so I decided to go East and learn the bond business." Note, it's probably not that Nick misses the war, but that he misses the adrenaline rush of the war and is looking for something like it again. This idea of repeating something that can't be repeated.

2) Tom Buchanan - "... had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven -- a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax." Tom is looking for the excitement of that lost football game, that lost national figure.

3) Jay Gatsby - reaches out for the green light. 

The women in this chapter both have things in their past that they seem to want to forget. 

Lecture on chapter 1

 

Lecture on the overview of the book