Fransis scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby, chapters 8-9

THE GREAT GATSBY, Chapters 8-9

The aim of the lesson is to teach you how to find out the purpose of the author when he does not state it clearly in the work and the indications are very slight.

1. The organistic future that Gatsby dreams finds its opposition in Nick Carraway’s nightmare vision. Nick sees West Egg as a group of grotesque houses crouching beneath a lustreless moon. There, “four men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress, her hand sparkling cold with jewels.” In this sinister vision, “Gravely the men turn in at a house - the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.” The nightmare fuses many elements: Gatsby’s alcoholic parties with their indifferent guests; Daisy, drunk, with the pearls that have bought her, poured into her wedding dress for delivery to the wrong man; Myrtle laid out on the garage bench, her indifferent slayer driving on; Tom turning in at the jewelry store to buy another pearl necklace and begin another affair.

Sum up the given information and say what other associations make it possible to accept Nick’s nightmarish vision as a generalized comment on the narrative he offers us.

2. The sinister quality of Nick’s vision matches the nightmarish character of the concluding chapters. This concerns not only the events themselves but the way in which they are presented. Here Fitzgerald uses Edgar Poe’s method of bringing the reader’s emotions into a state of tension, so that it seems that in a moment or two they might snap. This is the discovery that our feelings are most alert when we are in a state between life and death, dream and reality. The unattainable is vivid, and within reach, and when it’s just near and you might get hold of it, you feel up against a wall and it vanishes forever.

Give a summary of the concluding chapters stressing the nightmarish quality of the events and the way they are told.

3. Even seemingly minor details reverberate widely in the novel. Hence, a nameless little man with enormous “owl-eyed spectacles” has the natural keenness of vision to penetrate Gatsby’s person and to recognize the thoroughness with which Gatsby has filled out his “Platonic conception of himself.” The chapters are rich with multiple ironies, with natural vision focused on revealing the genuine beneath the sham.

Speak of the seemingly minor details that reverberate widely in the novel.

4. Gatsby’s “ greatness ”, which is both heroic and grotesque, is, of course, the centre of the novel. Carraway has it just right when he describes Gatsby as a “turbaned character leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.” It is all there, the sordid and commonplace facts and the fantastic legend together. And, paradoxically, Gatsby has lived both…

Speak of Gatsby’s sham and genuine greatness. Is Nick right when, on an impulse of his heart, he shouts across the lawn, “You are worth the whole damn bunch put together”?

5. Explain what the book is about. (Among other things, interpret the very end of the book, considering the usage of the generalizing pronoun “we”, the aposiopesis (=a break in the narrative), and the final metaphor:

“… tomorrow we shall run faster, stretch our arms farther… And one fine morning - -

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”)

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