Lesson Content : Thursday 29th September

In the lesson we looked at the opening two paragraphs of chapter 2. This shows a significant change in the language used by our narrator. We discussed how the tone of the text changes at this point and explored some of the possible reasons for this.

The presentation I used in the lesson, which has your homework question son it, can be found by clicking here.

Characterisation in Chapter 1 : Excellent Work

The image below is the work completed by Ellie, Lauren and Grant for homework. They were asked to think about how the character of Daisy is presented to us by Nick Carraway in chapter 1 of the novel. If you click on the picture it will open in a separate page and you can then take a closer look at some of the comments made.

Ellie states that Daisy "reminds me of a siren". I like this comment and agree with what Ellie says. Daisy's voice certainly seems to draw people towards her and, from what we discover later in the novel, Nick sees her (and her husband) as being "reckless" and uncaring of how their behaviour impacts on other people. The question is, of course, do you trust Nick's opinion?

The Ending of Chapter 1

"I didn't call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone - he stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward - and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness." (16)

So ends the first chapter of The Great Gatsby and brings to our attention the first symbol in this book - that mysterious green light. In our first acquaintance with the light, we see Gatsby reaching out for it, almost, in a way, worshipping it. We find out later that this green light is at the end of Daisy's dock, and is a symbol for Gatsby's dream and the hope for the future.

Green is the color of promise, hope, and renewal (and envy?) so it is fitting that Gatsby's dream of a future with Daisy be represented physically in the novel by this green light. Later, in the final chapter of this novel, Fitzgerald compares Gatsby's green light to the "green breast of the new world" (115), comparing Gatsby's dream of rediscovering Daisy to the explorer's discovery of America and the promise of a new continent.

However, Gatsby's dream is tarnished by his material possessions, much like America is now with society's obsession with wealth. The means corrupt the end, and Gatsby's dream dies because of Daisy, Gatsby, and Tom's carelessness and superficiality, as does Gatsby for the same reasons.

A Summary of the Main Events in Chapter 1

Chapter 1

As the first chapter begins, we are introduced the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway.  Nick is in the process of writing a book about his experiences on the East Coast of America, and in particular about his dealings with a man called Jay Gatsby.   Nick tells us very little about his own origins, except that he is a descendent of the Dukes of Buccleuch. 

Nick tells us that he has served in the First World War and that it has had a major impact on his life.  His move to the East Coast of America was triggered by returning home to the Mid-West to find it a place changed from the one he remembered before he left.

In turn, Nick moves to West Egg.  It is here that he – and the audience – first becomes aware of Jay Gatsby who lives in a mansion next to Nick.  Nick describes West Egg as full of ‘white palaces’. 

Nick recounts a visit to the house of Tom Buchanan, one of his old collegiate buddies from Yale, and Daisy, Nick’s cousin once removed.  Buchanan in an archetypal alpha male: he is physically strong, extremely wealthy and hides a burning aggression; he also holds racist attitudes.

As the evening draws to a close, Nick catches his first glimpse of Gatsby; the enigmatic protagonist of the novel is staring, almost transfixed, by a green light at the end of the Buchanan’s dock.

Lesson Content : Thursday 22nd September

We watched the Spark Notes video for the novel in the lesson - the purpose of this was to try to give you an overview of the main events in the novel so you can, hopefully, understand things a little better as we progress through the chapters.

I wanted to give you a demonstration of how I make notes as I read through and we did a little guided reading. This involved me reading the text on screen and then explaining how I question things, make links and create notes in the text as I am reading. This is a skill you need to develop yourself.

Homework - read to the end of chapter 1 for next lesson, making notes as you go along.

The Great Gatsby (1974) Part 1/14

This is the firstpart of the 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby. Like most film versions of a book, it doesn't follow the narrative strictly but it is useful to give an idea of the setting and location of the narrative. Watch from 3:30 to 7:00 in this 10 minute clip to get an idea of what Tom and Daisy's mansion would have been like, The depiction of the room where Nick meets Daisy and Jordan Baker is very close to the room as it is described below:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which 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. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

Lesson Content : Tuesday 20th September

We looked at the assessment objectives for this unit and how the exam paper works before looking more closely at the opening of chapter 1 in the lesson today.

I will post some of the notes from the pages in my IWB presentation when I am in school tomorrow - I can't access them from home! The main objectives of the lesson were as follows:

• to demonstrate understanding of the events of the opening of chapter 1
• to identify biographical facts about the narrative voice of the novel - Nick Carraway.
• to consider your own opinion of Nick as a narrator from the information presented in the opening to chapter 1 - is he a trustworthy narrator?
• to identify key aspects of setting and the other characters introduced to us by Nick, namely Gatsby and Tom Buchanan.

Some of you were a little unsure of the geography of the novel as expalined to us by Nick. Here is some extra information to help:

We learn that Nick was brought up in a Middle Western city but moved east to New York in 1922. You need to have some idea of the geography of this so take a look at a map of the USA. Minnesota is where Nick was brought up - see if you can locate this. See if you can find New York too - it shouldn't be hard!

Try the map found HERE

Now, remember that the novel was published in 1925 and New York was a very different city then to the New York you will be used to seeing in film and television. The map below gives an idea of the New York Fitzgerald set his novel in:



Nick tells us that he lives in West Egg and he has a run-down bungalow next to a house owned by a man named 'Gatsby'. West Egg is not as fashionable as East Egg, another prominatory of land that juts out into Long Island Sound. These are his words:

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York — and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.

Gatsby is said to live in a colossal affair by any standard — it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden.

This is the type of building being described to us:



Tom and Daisy Buchanan's house, which Nick visits in the opening section of chapter 1 is located in East Egg and is described as follows:

Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay.

Nick also gives us a few more details a little later, telling us that other features of Tom and Daisy's house include a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.

Again, it is useful to see an image of the type of house Nick is describing:

Gatsby's American Dream: Reading The Great Gatsby Critically, Chapter 1

John Green discusses the first chapter of 'The Great Gatsby', including thoughts on the role that the ideas of the self-made man and the American dream fuel the beginning of the novel. Themes, metaphors, and symbols are all discussed--although hopefully not in that boring and unlikable way you all find so reprehensible.

'The Great Gatsby' - Read the text online

Isn't it marvellous that, in this modern age, you can read the text of 'The Great Gatsby'online should you lose your copy of the book itself. Wonderful.

CLICK HERE  to be taken to the ebook provided by The University of Adelaide.

A Brief Life of Fitzgerald

The text below was produced from The University of South Carolina for the Fitzgerald Centenary. The text is reproduced exactly with some US spelling of words.

The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol.

    Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the National Anthem. Fitzgerald’s given names indicate his parents’ pride in his father’s ancestry. His father, Edward, was from Maryland, with an allegiance to the Old South and its values. Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Both were Catholics.

    Edward Fitzgerald failed as a manufacturer of wicker furniture in St. Paul, and he became a salesman for Procter & Gamble in upstate New York. After he was dismissed in 1908, when his son was twelve, the family returned to St. Paul and lived comfortably on Mollie Fitzgerald’s inheritance. Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy; his first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen.

    During 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship. He wrote the scripts and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals and was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine. His college friends included Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. On academic probation and unlikely to graduate, Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, “The Romantic Egotist”; the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons praised the novel’s originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised.

    In June 1918 Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. There he fell in love with a celebrated belle, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The romance intensified Fitzgerald’s hopes for the success of his novel, but after revision it was rejected by Scribners for a second time. The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas; after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry. Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda Sayre broke their engagement.

    Fitzgerald quit his job in July 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise. It was accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribners in September. Set mainly at Princeton and described by its author as “a quest novel,” This Side of Paradise traces the career aspirations and love disappointments of Amory Blaine.

    In the fall-winter of 1919 Fitzgerald commenced his career as a writer of stories for the mass-circulation magazines. Working through agent Harold Ober, Fitzgerald interrupted work on his novels to write moneymaking popular fiction for the rest of his life. The Saturday Evening Post became Fitzgerald’s best story market, and he was regarded as a “Post writer.” His early commercial stories about young love introduced a fresh character: the independent, determined young American woman who appeared in “The Offshore Pirate” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Fitzgerald’s more ambitious stories, such as “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” were published in The Smart Set, which had a small circulation.

    The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities. Fitzgerald endeavored to earn a solid literary reputation, but his playboy image impeded the proper assessment of his work.

    After a riotous summer in Westport, Connecticut, the Fitzgeralds took an apartment in New York City; there he wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, a naturalistic chronicle of the dissipation of Anthony and Gloria Patch. When Zelda Fitzgerald became pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, who was born in October 1921.

    The Fitzgeralds expected to become affluent from his play, The Vegetable.  In the fall of 1922 they moved to Great Neck, Long Island, in order to be near Broadway. The political satireòsubtitled “From President to Postman”òfailed at its tryout in November 1923, and Fitzgerald wrote his way out of debt with short stories. The distractions of Great Neck and New York prevented Fitzgerald from making progress on his third novel. During this time his drinking increased. He was an alcoholic, but he wrote sober. Zelda Fitzgerald regularly got “tight,” but she was not an alcoholic. There were frequent domestic rows, usually triggered by drinking bouts.

    Literary opinion makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious craftsman. His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts. Fitzgerald’s clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style evoked the emotions associated with time and place. When critics objected to Fitzgerald’s concern with love and success, his response was: “But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” The chief theme of Fitzgerald’s work is aspiration - the idealism he regarded as defining American character. Another major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian Fitzgerald became identified with the Jazz Age: “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” he wrote in “Echoes of the Jazz Age.”

    Seeking tranquility for his work the Fitzgeralds went to France in the spring of 1924 . He wrote The Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael, but the marriage was damaged by Zelda’s involvement with a French naval aviator. The extent of the affair - if it was in fact consummated - is not known. On the Riviera the Fitzgeralds formed a close friendship with  affluent and cultured American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy.

    The Fitzgeralds spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great Gatsby; they were en route to Paris when the novel was published in April. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, utilizing a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald’s achievement received critical praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights brought additional income.

    In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway - then unknown outside the expatriate literary circle - with whom he formed a friendship based largely on his admiration for Hemingway’s personality and genius. The Fitzgeralds remained in France until the end of 1926, alternating between Paris and the Riviera. Fitzgerald made little progress on his fourth novel, a study of American expatriates in France provisionally titled “The Boy Who Killed His Mother,” “Our Type,” and “The World’s Fair.” During these years Zelda Fitzgerald’s unconventional behavior became increasingly eccentric.

    The Fitzgeralds returned to America to escape the distractions of France. After a short, unsuccessful stint of screen writing in Hollywood, Fitzgerald rented “Ellerslie,” a mansion near Wilmington, Delaware, in the spring of 1927. The family remained at “Ellerslie” for two years interrupted by a visit to Paris in the summer of 1928, but Fitzgerald was still unable to make significant progress on his novel. At this time Zelda Fitzgerald commenced ballet training, intending to become a professional dancer. The Fitzgeralds returned to France in the spring of 1929, where Zelda’s intense ballet work damaged her health and contributed to the couple’s estrangement. In April 1930 she suffered her first breakdown. She was treated at Prangins clinic in Switzerland until September 1931, while Fitzgerald lived in Swiss hotels. Work on the novel was again suspended as he wrote short stories to pay for psychiatric treatment.

    Fitzgerald’s peak story fee of $4,000 from The Saturday Evening Post may have had in 1929 the purchasing power of $40,000 in present-day dollars. Nonetheless, the general view of his affluence is distorted. Fitzgerald was not among the highest-paid writers of his time; his novels earned comparatively little, and most of his income came from 160 magazine stories. During the 1920s his income from all sources averaged under $25,000 a yearògood money at a time when a schoolteacher’s average annual salary was $1,299, but not a fortune. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did spend money faster than he earned it; the author who wrote so eloquently about the effects of money on character was unable to manage his own finances.

    The Fitzgeralds returned to America in the fall of 1931 and rented a house in Montgomery. Fitzgerald made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in 1931. Zelda Fitzgerald suffered a relapse in February 1932 and entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She spent the rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums.

    In 1932, while a patient at Johns Hopkins, Zelda Fitzgerald rapidly wrote Save Me the Waltz. Her autobiographical novel generated considerable bitterness between the Fitzgeralds, for he regarded it as pre-empting the material that he was using in his novel-in-progress. Fitzgerald rented “La Paix,” a house outside Baltimore, where he completed his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night. Published in 1934, his most ambitious novel was a commercial failure, and its merits were matters of critical dispute. Set in France during the 1920s, Tender Is the Night examines the deterioration of Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist, during the course of his marriage to a wealthy mental patient.

    The 1936-1937 period is known as “the crack-up” from the title of an essay Fitzgerald wrote in 1936. Ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories, he lived in hotels in the region near Asheville, North Carolina, where in 1936 Zelda Fitzgerald entered Highland Hospital. After Baltimore Fitzgerald did not maintain a home for Scottie. When she was fourteen she went to boarding school, and the Obers became her surrogate family. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald functioned as a concerned father by mail, attempting to supervise Scottie’s education and to shape her social values.

    Fitzgerald went to Hollywood alone in the summer of 1937 with a six-month Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screenwriting contract at $1,000 a week. He received his only screen credit for adapting Three Comrades (1938), and his contract was renewed for a year at $1,250 a week. The $91,000 he earned from MGM was a great deal of money during the late Depression years when a new Chevrolet coupe cost $619; but although Fitzgerald paid off most of his debts, he was unable to save. His trips East to visit his wife were disastrous. In California Fitzgerald fell in love with movie columnist Sheilah Graham. Their relationship endured despite his benders. After MGM dropped his option at the end of 1938, Fitzgerald worked as a freelance script writer and wrote short-short stories for Esquire. He began his Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and had written more than half of a working draft when he died of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment on December 21, 1940. Zelda Fitzgerald perished at a fire in Highland Hospital in 1948.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity. The first phase of the Fitzgerald resurrection - “revival” does not properly describe the process - occurred between 1945 and 1950. By 1960 he had achieved a secure place among America’s enduring writers. The Great Gatsby, a work that seriously examines the theme of aspiration in an American setting, defines the classic American novel.

Video SparkNotes: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby summary

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great American Dreamer part 5

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great American Dreamer part 4

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great American Dreamer part 3

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great American Dreamer part 2

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great American Dreamer part 1

Unit 1 : Aspects of Narrative

I think it is really important for you to understand why we are going to be studying 'The Great Gatsby'. Please take the time to read through the information below. It may take a couple of times for it to become clearer. Don't worry if it all seems very complicated right now - it will make more sense as we progress through the course.

We are studying the AQA English Literature B syllabus.

The aim Unit 1 is to introduce you to the central position of narrative in the ways in which

literary texts work. The term narrative is taken in a broad sense here, involving many different aspects of literary representation, with particular focus on how narratives are constructed by authors, and the different ways in which they can be responded to by readers.

You study 4 texts in all for this unit : 2 prose texts and 2 poetry texts. You will do one of each with myself and Mrs Notley.

Assessment will be by one written exam paper of 2 hours’ duration which you will take at the end of Year 12.

There will be two sections to the paper, Section A and Section B. You will be required to answer one question from each section. Each question will be marked out of 42, giving an overall maximum mark for the paper of 84 marks.

Section A will have one question on each of the set texts, each question having two parts.

You will answer one question on one text. Each question will require you to:

• comment in detail on the narrative method of an extract

• relate this extract to wider concerns within the text as a whole.

Section B will have two questions. Both questions will require you to compare aspects of narrative across three texts that you have studied. You will answer one question.  The three texts written about must not include the text referred to in Section A.

You are permitted to take your texts into the examination. This allows you to be pointed to

sections of texts in Section A, and to refresh your memory of the form and structure of texts for Section B.

You have to remember, of course, that the open book format does not remove the requirement that you know the texts well and can refer to them in detail. This is A level and not GCSE!

Texts taken into the examination must be clean, that is, free from annotation.

A copy of the full syllabus can be found HERE.

Thursday 8th September

In the lesson today we started to look into the social, historical and cultural context of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, 'The Great Gatsby'. You will have time to continue working on the treasure trail (see the post below) in our next lesson.

The objective is for you to undertake independent research in order to be able to have a better understanding of America in the 1920s. This will be vital if you are to fully engage with, and understand, the text.

You need to be prepared to be able to 'teach the teacher' about all of the tasks in the treasure trail except task 2.

I really enjoyed meeting as a class and think we have got a lot of success to look forward to.

The Great Gatsby - Treasure Trail

The Great Gatsby - Treasure Trail