Literary Analysis Passage Analysis
The Great Gatsby
Prompt 1: Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-organized essay, analyze the literary
techniques Fitzgerald uses to characterize George Wilson.
He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw
us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.
"Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder.
"How's business?"
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"I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to
sell me that car?"
"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."
"Works pretty slow, don't he?"
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"No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe
I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."
"I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant----"
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His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I
heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman
blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and
faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can.
Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet
or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her
as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly
and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with
Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning
around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:
"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."
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"Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little office,
mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust
veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity-except his wife, who moved close to Tom.
Literary Analysis Passage Analysis
The Great Gatsby
Prompt 2: Read the passage carefully. Then write a well-developed essay in which you analyze
how Fitzgerald portrays these two characters and their relationship.
She turned her head as there was a light dignified knocking at the front door. I
went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like
weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically
into my eyes.
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With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall, turned
sharply as if he were on a wire, and disappeared into the living-room. It wasn't a
bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own heart I pulled the door to against
the increasing rain.
For half a minute there wasn't a sound. Then from the living-room I heard a sort
of choking murmur and part of a laugh, followed by Daisy's voice on a clear
artificial note: "I certainly am awfully glad to see you again."
A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall, so I went into the
room.
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Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a
strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back so
far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock, and from this
position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy, who was sitting, frightened but
graceful, on the edge of a stiff chair.
"We've met before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at me, and
his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this
moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and
caught it with trembling fingers, and set it back in place. Then he sat down,
rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.
Literary Analysis Passage Analysis
The Great Gatsby
Prompt 3: Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Fitzgerald uses
elements such as point of view, selection of detail, and syntax to make a social commentary about
the American Dream.
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10
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Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights
except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the
moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I
became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a
fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made
way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of
all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his
breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in
history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's
wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He
had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind
him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark
fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
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--to-morrow we will run faster,
stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----
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So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Literary Analysis Passage Analysis
The Great Gatsby
Prompt 4: Read the passage carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze the
literary techniques Fitzgerald uses to reveal his attitudes toward the people he describes.
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10
The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the
piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus,
engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course
of her song she had decided, ineptly, that everything was very, very sad—she
was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the
song she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a
quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for
when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an
inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous
suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw
up her hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous sleep.
“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a girl at my
elbow.
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I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with
men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the quartet from East Egg,
were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious
intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the
situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and resorted to
flank attacks—at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry
diamond, and hissed: “You promised!” into his ear.
The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at
present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives.
The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices.
“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”
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“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”
“We’re always the first ones to leave.”
“So are we.”
“Well, we’re almost the last to-night,” said one of the men sheepishly. “The
orchestra left half an hour ago.”
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In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility,
the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into
the night.
Literary Analysis Passage Analysis
The Great Gatsby
Prompt 5: Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Fitzgerald
conveys the impact the events of the novel had on Nick.
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10
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That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns,
but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh
bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted
windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long
winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city
where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now
that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and
Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in
common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its
superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their
interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even
then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still
figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a
hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen,
overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn 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, which dangles over the side,
sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house.
But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.
After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my
eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the
air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back
home.