Great Gatsby

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  • Created by: Maisikins
  • Created on: 07-02-15 13:16
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  • Great Gatsby
    • Characters
      • Daisy
        • frail and shallow
        • content with materialistic life
        • "her voice was like money"
        • dresses in pale colours- represents innocence.
      • Tom
        • Bigoted racist
        • violent nature
        • automatically dislikable
        • "Brute" "hulking"
      • Myrtle
        • Contrast to daisy, red lipstick and dark colours
        • "you cant live forever"- excuse for having affair, ignorance and selfishness
        • "large hips and fleshy breasts"
      • Nick
        • 1st person intradiagetic narrator. - realistic, not involved in everything.
        • An outsider- not included in any social group. Makes us think he is more ikely to be subjective, irony.
        • Tolerant, empty reciprocal for others to give information.
      • Gatsby
        • presented as "god-like"
        • Reaches for unobtainable "green light" highlights his desire for something which was moved beyond him.
        • symbolises american dream and its failure
    • Chapters
      • Openings
        • 1
          • In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
        • 2
          • About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land.
        • 3
          • There was music from my neighbour's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars
        • 4
          • On sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby's house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.
        • 5
          • When I came to west egg that night I was afraid for a moment my house was on fire.
        • 6
          • About  this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby's door and asked if he had anything to say.
        • 7
          • It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night - and as obscurely as it begin his career as Trimalchio was over.
        • 8
          • I couldn't sleep all night; a fog horn was groaning incessantly on the sound, and I tossed half sick between grotesque reality ad savage frightening dreams.
        • 9
          • After two years I remember the day, and that night and the next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers and newspaper men in and out of Gatsby's front door.
      • Endings
        • 1
          • When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was once again alone in the unquiet darkness.
        • 2
          • Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning tribune, and waiting for the four o clock train.
        • 3
          • Everyone suspects himself of at least one cardinal virtues and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
        • 4
          • Her wan, scornful mouth smiled and so i drew her up again closer, this time to my face.
        • 5
          • Then  I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.
        • 6
          • But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
        • 7
          • So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.
        • 8
          • 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.
        • 9
          • Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but thats no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... and one fine morning- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
      • Opening sentences
        • 1
          • In chapter 1, the reader is introduced to both the first person intradiagetic narrator, Nick Carraway, and to the extravagent world of the fabulously wealthy East Egg inhabitants.
        • 2
          • The opulence of the East and West Egg is contrasted with the introduction of a new setting at the beginning of chapter 2; the "valley of ashes". Chapter 2 is primarily centered on the plight of the socially aspirant lower classes, namely Myrtle and George Wilson.
        • 3
          • In chapter 3, the reader is introduced to the ostentatious prodigality of the West Egg and the Eponymous hero, Gatsby.
        • 4
          • Chapter 4 serves to further expose the character of Gatsby, in particular his criminal connections and his past relationship with Daisy.
        • 5
          • Chapter 5 is arguably the most romantic chapter in the novel, Gatsby is reunited with Daisy in what seems to be the culmination of his efforts to  win her affection.
        • 6
          • Towards the end of chapter 5, there are suggestions that Gatsby's dream is deteriorating and this consequently is a motif that pervades chapter 6.
        • 7
          • In chapter 7, Fitzgerald continues his critique of the American Dream through his deception of the decline of Gatsby's dream.
        • 8
          • In chapter 8, Fitzgerald highlights the collapse of Gatsby's dream, which serves as a microcosm of the American Dream. The failure of Gatsby's aspirations are concluded by his death at the end of the chapter.
        • 9
          • In the final chapter of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald continues his critique regarding the corrupt morality of the American Society and the futility of the American Dream.

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