Outline For The Great Gatsby

Literature Circle: Week Three

Theme
1)
a. “A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did Gatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously and he spoke of the rain in a worried uncertain way. The minister glanced several times at his watch so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.” (p. 174)
b. The theme represented here is the downfall of the American vision in (American dream, if you will) in the 1920s.
c. In this passage Fitzgerald uses one technique in particular to develop this theme. The method used is character

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—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….” (p. 179)
b. The theme represented here is role of wealth in class and society.
c. The method used to develop theme in this passage is repetition. Three times in the course of this short passage does Fitzgerald use the word ‘careless’ or some form of it. This heavily pushes the idea that the wealth of the upper class enables their actions to be heedless and their thoughts toward others be uncaring. This passage also specifically mentions that they have wealth as the dividing factor that sets them apart from the rest of

The element of style used in this passage is imagery. I found that the imagery in this book was incredible, especially the imagery describing the slowness of summery days. This passage really recalls the hot summer days of my own memory.

2)
a. “There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.” (p. 148-149)
b. The element of style used in this passage is sentence structure. Fitzgerald uses very long, flowing sentences in The Great Gatsby. These sentences never rush like many long sentences seem to. Fitzgerald makes much use of punctuation that slows down his sentences so that they seem to drift from thought to thought in a way that makes you connect ideas that you normally would not, simply because of the presence of a period. This particular passage stood out due to the extraordinary length of it. Its length really exemplifies Fitzgerald’s style of writing and use of sentence length.