This post is a reflection of the in class reading and activities we have been doing to help ourselves understand The Great Gatsby. It includes images from our classroom and the chapter tasks we have been doing along the way.
We have finished reading Chapter One and have met the cast except for the title character. Nick has reunited with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan and her husband, Tom and also met the sophisticated Jordan Baker. We are coming to grips with Fitzgerald’s rich imagery and his unique style.
In order to set ourselves up for the rest of the story, we spent some time thinking about our first impressions of the characters we have met so far. Students were asked to write down 5 adjectives to describe each character and then find 2 quotations from the text to support their descriptions. It was suggested that students record this in a table form, as illustrated below.
The class then began to explore Daisy Buchanan, a central figure in the novel via the quotations below. We did this as a class.
Daisy-Buchannan-The-First-MeetingFinally, the students have reflected on the questions below and will share their answers with the class in a discussion on Monday.
Food-for-ThoughtChapter two opens with a stunning description of The Valley of Ashes. We paused after reading this and spent some time unpacking and annotating this description.
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. This is a valley of ashes a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”
On the day we were reading the second chapter, the weather was very warm and due to a lack of climate control in our classroom, we headed for the trees outside to do some reading.
Following our reading, the class spent time answering the questions below. We then discussed our responses to these questions and developed our answers as a class.
Chapter three saw the class meet the title character of the novel,
The class then spent time, as we do at the end of each chapter, reflecting on the questions below. The answers were shared and developed in a class discussion. The goal is to ensure that the students are thinking about things while they are fresh in their minds. We will spend time once we have finished reading the novel tying all of these snippets of information together.
The class now moves into reading Chapter Four and along the way, we stopped to explore the setting of New York City, as described by Nick in this chapter.
Chapter five saw the reunion we hadn’t so much as been waiting for but were eager to see play out nonetheless. We discussed some important symbols of the book that arise in this chapter and our notes from this discussion can be found below.
As we moved into chapter 6, the action in the novel began to really heat up. We read about Tom and Gatsby’s meeting and finally, Daisy attended one of Gatsby’s infamous parties.
Chapter 7 delivers the most tense scenes in the story so far. The class got comfortable for the reading of this chapter and we said farewell to someone we believed to be only a minor character. Myrtles death was a surprise to the class and we discussed what it represented. There were many good points made but the standout idea was certainly that Myrtle symbolises the way that the wealthy characters in our text (and by extension, the world) view the people around them, especially those who are of a lower social class than themselves.
Everyone was wondering where the story could possibly go following Myrtle’s death and we learn a lot about the true story behind “Jay Gatsby”. Chapter 8 also bought us the death of our ‘hero’, though, at this point, not many in the class are feeling like Gatsby is a top notch bloke.
We finally reached the end! And what an ending it is. I think the line, “So we beat on, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past.” is one of my favourites of the book. Following a discussion around the closing lines of the novel, we completed our chapter explorations and will now be moving on to our analysis of the text. You can find the task and any discussion notes for this on the blog post ‘Gatsby- An Analysis’.
