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: