Chapter Seven: Compare and Contrast Chapters One and Seven
A. The party at Tom and Daisy's AND The party at the Plaza Hotel
B. Gatsby staring at the green light AND Gatsby staring at the lighted windows of the Buchannan's house
Directions: 1) Make a big T-chart 2) In a written response note both how the mood has changed between the scenes AND the thing/person most affected by the unfolding conflict.
Chapter Seven: Image Illustration
One of my favorite things about The Great Gatsby is that it's such a colorful book; Gatsby seems to be having his adventures in the midst of a veritable rainbow. Select an image from the book that strikes you as particularly vivid - something that stands out for you. Then create an illustration with the following components:
1. Draw the image. Your picture should indicate not only what the image looks like, but also what it signifies or connotes. (In other words, if you draw the green light your picture should make clear its significance for Gatsby).
2. Incorporate into your drawing at least one quotation that describes the image.
Chapter Eight: Choose what you believe to be the three most important passages in this chapter. Be prepared to read them aloud and pose a discussion question to the class. Remember, your question should motivate your classmates to explore the passage without giving away your full reason for selecting it.
Chapter Eight: Gatsby and Color
Directions: For each of the quotations below, explain how the color word(s) contributes to the meaning. In other words, what is the effect of associating Daisy with white? What does the phrase “blue gardens” contribute to the atmosphere of Gatsby’s party.
- “...two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house” (12).
- “[Daisy] dressed in white and had a little white roadster . . . .”(79).
- “Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud . . . .” (27).
- “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (43).
- “The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher” (44).
- “...Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and slapping himself on the knee of his caramel-colored suit” (69).
- “...Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in” (89).
- “...shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue” (98).
Chapter 8 Gatsby Quotations: In writing, analyze one of these quotations. Use your knowledge of the text to draw conclusions about characters, conflicts, themes, symbols…whatever strikes you as interesting.
- He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is an how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. (161)
- A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (161)
- It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete. (162).
Chapter 9 Gatsby Quotations: In writing, analyze one of these quotations. Use your knowledge of the text to draw conclusions about characters, conflicts, themes, symbols…whatever strikes you as interesting.
- ...it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested -- interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end. (164)
- “If he’d of lived he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.” (168)
- “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone.” (172)
- It was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty with many hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. “Look there!” and then sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown it so often that I think it was more real to him now than the house itself. (172)
- “The poor son-of-a-bitch,” he said. (175)
- I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common that which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” . . (176)
- They were careless people. . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . . (179)
- Face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. (180)
- He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. (180)
- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (180)
A few Gatsby questions for late in the novel
1) Who seems closer to fulfilling his American Dream, Tom or Gatsby? Define your vision of the American Dream and analyze each character’s relation to it.
2) Why and in what way does Jay Gatsby sustain Nick’s need for wonder? Is Nick’s capacity for wonder limited in any way or by anyone?
3) What is the line between fiction and reality in the novel? How do Fitzgerald and the novel’s characters use the art of storytelling and why? What’s the message about fiction in the twentieth century? What’s the message about reality and truth in the twentieth century?
4) Is Gatsby’s quest heroic? Could you define Gatsby as a hero or a tragic hero? If he’s tragic, what is the real and ultimate tragedy in the book?