Chapter One:

• Nick Carraway= pg.5 = “I lived in West Egg, the – well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.”
• Nick= pg.6 = “Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water…”
• Nick= pg.6 = “I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever-seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”
• Daisy= pg.10 = “Then she added irrelevantly: ‘You ought to see the baby.’”
• Daisy= pg.12 = “I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.” What do people plan?
• Nick= pg.13 = “… their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire.”
• Daisy= pg.18 = “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing that a girl can be in the world, a beautiful little fool.”
• Daisy= pg.18 = “ I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
• Nick= pg.18 = “… distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.”
• Nick= pg.22 = “He stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way… 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.”

Chapter Two:

• Nick= pg.23 = “This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”
• Nick= pg.32 = “Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.”
• Nick= pg.36 = “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

Chapter Three:

• Nick= pg.40 = “… turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.”
• Nick= pg.40 = “… now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music…”
• Nick= pg.43 = “…  two girls in twin yellow dresses…”
• Nick= pg.43 = “With Jordan’s slender golden arm…”
• Nick= pg.45 = “… East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety.”
• Owl eyes= pg.46 = “This fella’s a regular Belasco.”
• Nick= pg.47 = “… and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.”
• Nick= pg.48 = “He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.”
• Nick= pg.58 = “The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something…”

Chapter Four:

• Gatsby= pg.65 = “I am the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west—all dead now.”
• Nick= pg.66/67 = “My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.

Chapter Five:

• Nick= pg.85 = “… Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in.”
• Nick= pg.85 = “ Gatsby looked with vacant eyes…”
• Daisy= pg.87 = “… Daisy’s voice on a clear artificial note. ‘I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.’”
• Nick= pg.87 = “…  in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.”
• Gatsby= pg.91 = “I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people.”
• Nick= pg.92 = “… pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate.”
• Nick= pg.93 = “… toilet set of pure dull gold.”
• Gatsby= pg.94 = “If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay, you always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”
• Nick= pg.97 = “… the colossal vitality of his illusion.”

Chapter Six:

• Daisy= pg.105 = “ Just mention my name. Or present a green card. I’m giving out green–.”
• Nick= pg. 108 = “… appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing.”
• Gatsby= pg.  = “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!
• Nick= pg.99 = “[His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all](no.1). [The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself](no.2)… [he must be about His Father’s (GOD) Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year -old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception, he was faithful to the end](no.3).”

Plato was a Greek philosopher who, among many other things, was concerned with the real world versus the ideal world. (Gatz is a real person. He creates his ‘ideal self’ and names it Gatsby).

… these are all words to do with illusion

• Nick= pg.100 = “… they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”

Chapter Seven:

• Daisy’s child= pg.? = “‘Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress too.”
• Daisy= pg.118 = “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”
• Gatsby= pg.120 = “‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.”
• Nick= pg.124 = “He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world…”
• Nick= pg.? = “Over the ash heaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil…”
• Gatsby= pg.131 = “ I used to laugh sometimes—‘but there was no laughter in his eyes, ‘to think that you didn’t know.’”
• Nick= pg.132 = “Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all.”
• Nick= pg.136 = “Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone.”
• Nick= pg.136 = “They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts even from our pity.”
• Nick= pg.146 = “They weren’t happy… and yet they weren’t unhappy either.”

Chapter Eight:

• Nick= pg.149 = “… told it to me because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out.”
• Nick= pg.150 = “She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing.”
• Nick= pg.161 = “God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!”
• Nick= pg.161 = “… he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night.”
• Nick= pg.163 = “… he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among the yellowing trees.”
• Nick= pg.163 = “… paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”
• Nick= pg.163 = “He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about …”

He is seeing things through new eyes. He is seeing the world without the filter of Daisy.

His life is uncertain without Daisy.

A link to Daisy. She was his rose. When you first look at a rose, you see it’s beauty and elegance. It appears perfect. When you get close to it, touch it, you see the thorns and how painful and dangerous it can be. Earlier in the novel, when Gatsby and Daisy meet again, Fitzgerald surrounds them with flowers (harmless ones). Now it is revealed that Daisy is the rose in the garden – the most beautiful and perfect, but also the one that causes pain and creates danger.

Again, he is looking at the world for the first time. He is seeing it how it was created. ‘Raw’ implies that this may not be pleasant and it’s a new experience for him.

His house and  stuff, although there, has no true meaning to it. The illusion that these things mattered has gone. He is left with these things that have no intrinsic value.

This is a metaphor for Gatsby. He, as a ‘poor’ man, believed and chased his dreams so intently that they became vital to his survival. They were everything he built his life on. ‘Ghosts’ is a reference to him letting go of this need to attain this dream. That was his past self.

Do this colour for homework.

Chapter Nine:

• Nick= pg.165 = “Most of those reports were a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue.
• Meyer Wolfshiem= pg.173 = “‘I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine appearing, gentlemanly young man…’”
• Nick= pg.179 = “… even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.”
• Jordan= pg.180 = “‘… I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.’”
• Tom= pg.181 = “‘He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s…’”
• Nick= 182 = “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….”
• Nick= pg.183/184 = “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
• Nick= pg.120 = “That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…. High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl….”

   = Part 1) Metaphor. Wealth. Upper-class. It’s ingrained – she’s grown up this way.

   = Part 2) On the surface you think this means that she’s ‘upper-class’.

   = Part 3) …

Nick= pg.135 = “… he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name… with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.”

No.1) Adverb + Emotive language: Gatsby is flustered. Daisy and the dream of being with her is fading away. Everything is out in the open – a resolution will be reached and that is exciting.

No.2) Metaphor + Connotative language: ‘Gatsby’ is a fake name. He is defending an illusion and a dream.

No.3) Daisy tries to hide. She pulls away from the emotional battle because she is incapable of feeling it. She’s so shallow that she doesn’t know how to deal with what’s in front of her.

No.4) Gatsby’s dream is fading. He continues to  trying to fight for something that is no longer possible.

No.5)

“Merton College Library” = Gatsby ‘re-creates’(illusion)

= Recreation is a form of illusion. The fact that the library is a ‘fake’ version of a prestigious place links to the persona Gatsby has created for himself. The library is full of real books (owl-eyes says so in chapter three) representing the effort that Gatsby is putting into creating himself. The use of real books could also represent the fact that Gatsby honestly believes in his fantasy persona.

If it wasn’t for the mist (the rain, the past stands between them.) we could see your home across the bay, you always (it wasn’t seen that day.) have a green light (a possible new life with Daisy) that burns all night at the end of your dock.

= the hope that Gatsby has around a life with Daisy is blocked by the past. The mist, representing the 5 years that they have spent apart, shatters the illusion of the green light (the hope for a future). By masking the light, we are faced with the reality that we can never take back our past and this past therefore shapes the reality of our future, despite the hopes/dreams that we have.

“Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance(no.1) of that light had now vanished forever(no.2). Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her(no.3), almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon(no.4). Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one(no.5).”

• no.1= Gatsby’s belief and the importance he placed on the green light. It has consumed him.
• no.2= For something to ‘vanish’ it needs to have been fake or not really there all along – like a magic trick. Reality cannot vanish. This is the first moment in the story that Gatsby realises he is a living illusion.
• no.3= The light provided the illusion that there were not five years of past between Gatsby and Daisy.
• no.4= We look at the night sky and think that the stars and the moon are all close and near to each other. In reality, the stars are billions of miles from each other and from the moon. You could argue that Gatsby believes the illusion that he and Daisy are the stars and the moon from earth’s point of view, however, in reality. They are separated by their past and the last five years.
• no.5= ‘enchanted’ is like magic or a spell and Gatsby is almost spell-like in his quest to find Daisy again. This point in the novel is the first of many things that break his enchantment with her. He now has one less piece to create his dream of them being together.