Question

Genre Apprentice: You will create a narrative that shows Nick at some point during his journey with Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby, and Jordan Baker during the “Roaring Twenties.” YOU ARE WRITING IN NICK’S VOICE; this should feel like an integrated part of the story.

Starting Point:
• You may choose to do one of the following:
• Create an alternate ending.
• Re-write a scene from the novel.
• Create an extra chapter or scene.
• Other idea have checked with me first.

You will create a journal entry of at least 5 pages :
 The entry will be authentic to Nick’s voice as we have come to know it:
 ___He must describe where he is, both physically and mentally-- specifically mentioning places and events. (How he became the way he is)
 ___He should talk about some of the ideas that are most important to him.
 ___He must reference to a symbol or a thematic topic; this needs to be done seamlessly.
 ___He must mention in some detail his relationship with other important characters.
 ___There must be some sort of dialogue or conversation between the characters

 The journal entry/chapter must use the language of Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby.
 The book is your greatest reference.
 Look at the sections that best exemplify Nick’s voice.
 It cannot be a “rant” or a simple journal entry. There needs to be a purpose and a single focus.
 Informal slang should only be used the way Nick uses it.
 Part 1 should REALLY help you with the creation of this writing piece.
 The annotations are a great way to see all the stylistic elements Fitzgerald uses to create Nick’s voice.


Consider the following:
• Do not make “2023 assumptions” –the slang and expressions of 2023 are NOT Nick’s language!

 Use the language and the conventions of the 1920s as you have learned them while reading The Great Gatsby.

• *****Consider how we have seen Nick behave and talk in the book. Is he scared? Hurt? Afraid? Feeling guilty? Feeling angry? Hopeful at this point? Some of each?
 What insights can be revealed in Nick’s words?








 ___Nick must use hyperbole. (Requirement : 2 different examples)

 ___Nick must use similes and metaphors to make a point. (Requirement : 4-5 examples)

 ___Nick must use expressions similar to how he speaks in the rest of the text. (Requirement : 4 examples)

 ___Nick must make detailed, meaningful references to some experience that involves one of the other main characters- Daisy, Tom, Gatsby, and/or Jordan. (Requirement: 2 extended examples—at least a paragraph each.)

 ___Nick must talk about and reference one symbol.

 ___Nick must incorporate one of the key thematic topics.


 ___The narrative must make sense in terms of the novel as we have read it; in other words, it could be something F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote as supplement to the novel.)

 ___Length—two to two and one half pages! Broken into paragraphs!!!!

 After each element mentioned write what element it is right next to it in paranethsie

Answer 1

June 1923

I write this while the house is hushed and the lawns at West Egg lie gray under a moon that might as well be a benevolent face watching over very small ambitions. I am in the room that once looked out upon Gatsby's gardens; the hedges are still clipped with that curious precision which tries to deny the careless riot it shelters. (Where I am physically and mentally) I have come back, not because I wished to or because any homecoming called me, but because the long road inward requires a few last miles laid out in ink. (How I became the way I am) In my younger and more vulnerable years I left the Middle West with a bright indifference and a pocket full of illusions; the war, Yale, and the bond business taught me that people will polish a smile until it blinds you. (Nick-like expression) I confess now, without theatrical shame, that the East undid me as much as I tried to remain untangled. (How he became the way he is)

I write to set down one thing with steadier eyesight than I possessed when I passed through that great tumbling carnival of a summer. The thing I want to fix is not merely the particulars of what happened—who went where and why—but the little moral geography of it, the lines by which one measures men. If I have become anything sharper, anything more weary of pretense, it is because I stood within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled; I observed as one watches a play through a keyhole and yet lives in the actors' room. (Where I am mentally) I shall, therefore, speak plainly and without the roseate lens that the town prefers. (One of Nick's important ideas)

Gatsby's house still breathes his absence like a man leaving a window open in winter. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock is no longer a gleam across black water but a small, stubborn wound on the shore of my memory. (Symbol: the green light) I have taken to walking at dusk along the veranda, and the light—poor, patient, and ridiculous—puts everything into its peculiar scale: it makes sin seem tame and hope seem monstrous. (Simile) It is like a coin left on the sill of a bank, small and shining, but with the weight of a promise; it is like a star that kept falling to remind a man what he once thought the heavens owed him. (Similes) The light burns as if it were a single blind eye that refuses to be comforted. (Metaphor)

You will understand, perhaps, why I cannot be indifferent to Gatsby. He was a man who made his life into an enormous gesture—his house a beacon, his shirts a poem—and in doing so he became the greatest exhibit of all our petty religions. (Hyperbole) Once, at dusk in July, I saw him standing on the lawn with the whole world held between his hands, and it might as well have been the moon I'd offered him for all the good the gift did. (Hyperbole) I will not rescue him from the caricature; he was both grand and ridiculous, and that incompatibility, like a badly tuned piano, made the clearest music. (Metaphor) He talked with me often in those last weeks, and his sentences would fall upon me like parties breaking up: glittering, then awkwardly small. (Simile)

We spoke one evening in the library; the books smelled like other people's promises.

"Do you think," he said, with that unsteady composure he always convinced himself of, "that one can return to a single past?" (Dialogue)

"I do not know," I answered. "I have tried to be one of the few honest people I know, but I am not certain what honesty will avail." (Nick-like expression) (Dialogue)

He laughed, a sound like someone trying to arrange a room to hide a hole. "Old sport," he said—"old sport"—he loved the phrase as if it were a medal to pin upon himself. (Nick-like expression) "I wanted to just get her to a place where she would—where the whole thing would stand still." (Dialogue)

I could not tell him that places do not stand still; people collapse around them like paper fans. (Metaphor) Instead I shrugged, and my gesture was little more than a draft through a keyhole. (Simile)

My relationship with Daisy remains a ledger in which every line is written in water. (Metaphor) She is like a piece of soft china one cannot throw away because somehow its flaws are part of the room's decoration. (Simile) I spent an entire afternoon with her once, years ago, watching the rain make lace of the bay windows, and she told me with that practiced voice of hers that she loved us both—Tom and me and the sense of being loved as one collects baubles. (Extended: Daisy Buchanan) She said, "You oughtn't to be so sentimental, Nick," and meant it as both an admonition and a compliment, which was, I think, the sum of her moral grammar. (Dialogue)

That afternoon I felt pity and anger in equal measure; pity because she was the axis upon which the most delicate tragedies of our acquaintance turned, and anger because she would not, or could not, name the true cost. (Extended: Daisy Buchanan) The green light—so patient, so absurd—was the only thing that seemed to keep honest time. (Symbol: the green light)

Tom is a geography of force, a man constructed of golf clubs and resentments, who believes the world is a thing to be managed. (Simile) I had words with him once, not in the grand manner of duels but in the slow accusation of cups being set down on a table. (Metaphor) "You're always one of us," he told me, meaning that I had kept the measure of my decency a private thing and thereby forfeited whatever protection his crude honesty afforded. (Dialogue) He does not understand the softer currencies of motive; to him everything is either possession or a challenge to possession. (Extended: Tom Buchanan)

Jordan, gay and cynical and flat-footed in the landscape of truth, taught me the art of seeing a thing and saying nothing. (Extended: Jordan Baker) She plays golf and plays with the truth as with a small, glittering ball; she will tell you a story and let it bounce away when it pleases her. (Simile) With her, I practiced reserve until it became a habit of bathroom mirrors and brief, inarticulate smiles. (Nick-like expression)

Do not mistake me: I am not here to erect monuments nor to fling stones. I have always claimed to be inclined to reserve; I stood aside and tried to let the world demonstrate itself. (Nick-like expression) The trouble is that the world demonstrated with appalling rapidity the ways of moral negligence and the price it exacts. (Theme: carelessness / American Dream) Men who would build themselves like fortresses of desire found their citadels slight as sandcastles before the tide of consequence. (Metaphor)

There is a small conversation I overheard after the funeral that I cannot forget. Tom, with the bluntness of a man who keeps his conscience in a pocket, said to a neighbor in a voice that wanted to be casual, "If Gatsby hadn't been driving, none of it would have happened." (Dialogue) The neighbor mumbled—an apology for a man who had done nothing wrong but who nonetheless felt the need to be amiable—and Jordan stood a little apart, cigarette poised like a question. "People are careless," she observed, "because they can be." (Dialogue) The smallness of the remark, like a coin tossed into deep water, sank into the silence faster than any waves. (Simile)

I have used many metaphors in this entry because metaphors are what remain when the facts are too blunt for the delicate work of memory. (Metaphor) The whole summer feels to me like a terrific pageant that ended by peeling off its costumes and revealing, not always with shame but with a disconcerting ordinariness, the men underneath. (Simile) Gatsby is dead and yet he moves through my notes like an unwilling ghost; Daisy has returned to the safe orbit of Tom's solid indifference; the Buchanans will continue, as they always have, to let their careless hands shape the lives of lesser things. (Theme: carelessness)

If I learned any single lesson, it is that the American dream can be a two-edged thing: the hope that one may remake oneself, and the arrogance that believes the world owes that remaking its compliance. (Theme: American Dream) Gatsby reached for a light that was meant to guide but not to be possessed; he mistook a beacon for a harbor and so sailed on, even as the currents turned against him. (Metaphor)

Before I put down my pen I must name the small mercies: I was not undone, I am not violent of temper, and in the end I mean to go home. (Where I am going / purpose) The house will be sold; the parties will be a memory like a smashed glass left in a gutter. I shall take my wages, such as they are, and return to the Midwest where the fields have the unambiguous honesty of being what they are. (How he became the way he is)

Good night. (Purpose: closure)

(Extended: Jay Gatsby) (Hyperbole) (Hyperbole) (Simile) (Simile) (Simile) (Simile) (Metaphor) (Nick-like expression) (Nick-like expression) (Symbol: the green light) (Theme: American Dream) (Theme: carelessness) (Dialogue)