The Great Gatsby - Reading Guide #1

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald – Reading Guide – Number One

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Do some background reading on F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Which of the major characters in this book is more like Fitzgerald himself?

This novel was published in 1925.  Do some reading on the decade of the 1920s.  According to an entry in Wikipedia on The Roaring Twenties: “The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity and a break with traditions.”  What do you think this quote means?  Keep it in mind as you read this book.  We’ll come back to it later.

In Chapter 1, we meet four main characters.  List the four characters and, for each one, explain what we learn about them in this chapter.  What are they like?  What are their connections to one another?  What can you tell, already, about the conflicts between them? Are they happy?  Why or why not?

Where does Nick Carraway live?  Where do Tom and Daisy Buchanan live?  What are some of the differences between these two places?

What part of the country is Nick from?  How is this important?

Useful Links:

http://www.fiction-writers-mentor.com/point-of-view-in-fiction/  (brief discussion of point of view in fiction).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald (Wikipedia entry on F. Scott Fitzgerald)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties  (Wikipedia entry on “The Roaring Twenties”)

http://reading.cornell.edu/reading_project_06/gatsby/great_gatsby_resources.htm  (on-line and other resources related to “The Great Gatsby”)