American Literature – Gatsby Project
(A Junior Senior Elective – David LaMotte)
From the “yellow cocktail music” at Gatsby’s party, to Nick’s notion that
Gatsby sprang from his own Platonic conception of himself, to the eyes of Dr.
T. J Eckleburg (“God sees everything....” “That’s an advertisement….”), to Nick
thinking that Jordan “looked like a good illustration,” The Great Gatsby is a
work of colors, textures, and “gestures.” The writing is vividly sensual, shaped
by the tensions between appearances (the evidence of the senses) and the
shifting realities they hide or reveal, as Nick reads them for us and we
attempt, through understanding him, to read them for ourselves.
It is only fitting then to respond to this text in kind—through textures,
surfaces, performance, or perhaps through the kind of conflating of the
senses that occurs in that phrase “yellow cocktail music” (the literary term for
which is “synesthesia”).
(1) Create some work that mixes language with some other form of
expression to explore some theme or character from The Great Gatsby.

You could create a collage, a painting, a film, a song, a dance (or
some form of movement), a scene to be performed on stage….
Weave the language of the text into the piece you create.
(2) If you are more comfortable working in the realm of words you may work
with me to identify some question to be explored in relation to the novel and
then explore it in the form of

a critical essay

a series of poems, prose poems, or vignettes shedding light upon and
leaping outward from particular characters or particular moments in the
text (e.g., a poem or dramatic monologue in the voice of Dr. T.J
Eckleberg… Meyer Wolfsheim explains the meaning of life… The
Lovesong of Myrtle Wilson…)
Here are a few threads of theme and imagery you might explore. We will
start by brainstorming together and adding to this list:

The American Dream….

East & West…

Time…

CARelessnesS…

Colors…

Eyes…
Over…
A wonderful example of student work based on this assignment is hanging in Room 207
(or see accompanying photo). As I wrote to the student in my comment on the piece,
His “illuminated manuscript” is an imaginative and insightful exploration of a key
moment in Fitzgerald's text. But even more, it is an exploration of how we read and of
what it means to be an interpreter of a text, in the way it grows outward from his original
annotations, its tendrils of word and image establishing here a connection to some other
moment in the novel and there an open-ended speculation about a character or an idea,
creating a web of meaning and possibility, finite and unbounded, grounded in the text and
as free as the mind that created it. Here is the student’s own comment on his work:
Student Commentary
 Why did you choose to do this (how did it allow you to explore some aspect of
character or theme)?
 How did you go about it (what choices did you made along the way, and why)?
 In what way does your work illuminate or explore some aspect of character or
theme, some recurring image, or some moment in the text?
It is a rare opportunity to be able to explore a novel by means other than writing in an
English class. I harnessed this opportunity as both a chance to explore The Great Gatsby
but also finding another means of successfully analyzing the text without an analytic
essay.
The base of any analytic essay is in the text. The first time through I keep a record of
thoughts inspired by annotating the margin. Over time, the book progresses and through
class discussion my ideas and understanding of the book mature. I keep track of such
changes as best as I can. When I sit down to analyze the book again, this time with an
essay in mind, I can use my notation to jump start. This time working in a different
environment, not with an essay as the final result, I follow the same essential procedure: I
start with the text; I re-read the passage over an over, first transferring the marks I had in
my book initially and then making more and more of my own, not withholding any
thoughts, just writing away. Through this process I am able explore the text and see new
meaning. Simultaneously, the text notations build a complex visual ground.
The text on the center of the piece is four pages of the book (p.108-111). The text
starts with a conversation between Tom, Daisy, and Nick but continues to explain
Gatsby’s history with Daisy. This small sample of the book embodies many themes that
define the novel. My exploration traveled through ideas: starting with Gatsby’s extreme
nostalgia but leading me to discover that this story shows the corruption and failure of the
American dream. In fact the American dream, “a city on a hill”, has deteriorated to solely
materialism, in turn leading to the moral demise.
Gatsby gets rich quickly and is very successful but it doesn’t solve his problems. In
fact, one could argue that the money just leads to problems, starting with the fact that a
majority of the money is earned via illicit means. Gatsby successfully pursues the
American dream in solely a materialistic sense; unfortunately, the happiness is missing
from the equation.
Considering all this, it is interesting to look back at the beginning when Nick makes
reference to his father’s advice: “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just
remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
Following such a train of thought in this project, I traveled to other points in the book
and other concepts outside of the book entirely – the beauty of this process.