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.
• 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

West Egg, my little weather-stained bungalow on the margin where the lawn runs out and the bay takes command — this is where I sit tonight, with the lamps of New York smoldering like embers in the distance and the whole affair of the summer laid out before me like a map I have been trying not to read. (physical & mental location) I am tired in a way that is not merely bodily but moral, as if the lubricated gaieties of the season had worked on me until my judgements grew thin and translucent. (mental state) I write, then, to make a kind of account, to give myself the impression of having been honest about certain things I reserved judgment upon in the course of my acquaintance with them. (purpose & ideas important to him)

There is, in me, a stubborn belief in the value of candor and in the salutary discomfort of seeing things whole — perhaps an inheritance of the Midwest in which my mind was shaped, a wary Protestant fidelity to truth even when the truth is as unbeautiful as the valley of ashes. (ideas important to him) I find myself thinking of the green light across the water, that little phosphorescent beacon which has been, for me, more than a color at the end of a dock; it is a geography of desire, an emblem of the American dream that people keep insisting upon and never seem to quite possess. (symbol: green light) The dream, as Gatsby showed me, is at once luminous and delusional; it is a candle held in a hurricane. (thematic topic: American Dream)

I shall speak plainly of him first. Jay Gatsby — who filled his life with music and parties until the inside of him seemed as crowded and as hollow as a church on Christmas morning — is the most astonishing and the most pitiable figure I have known. (relationship with Gatsby) He made of his past a construction site and rebuilt himself with an industry that was almost heroic, and yet there was always about him a romantic impatience, as if he were trying to stitch the fabric of time back so that the torn place where Daisy once stood would be whole again. (simile/metaphor 1) When he smiled, which was rarely, the room at once took on the atmosphere of a theater when the curtain rises — everybody waiting, breath suspended. (simile/metaphor 2) I remember the night he took me out in his hydroplane; he was like a child who had discovered a new toy, flinging himself into motion with the arrogance of youth and the desperation of an older man who means to prove something to the world. (simile/metaphor 3)

We spoke, with the soft insistence of men who are accustomed to rehearsed truths, and yet when he touched upon Daisy the rehearsal broke down. (dialogue) "Nick," he said, with a gravity that made him sound like a man calling a vote at some solemn meeting, "do you think it's possible to repeat the past?" (dialogue) I remember answering — perhaps too briskly — "Why, of course you can." (dialogue) (dialogue) The exchange was simple, but it contained the fatal geometry of his hope; it was as if two people were measuring the same room with different tapes. (metaphor 4)

Gatsby's parties were, in their way, hyperbolic spectacles, seas of light and music so great that one might believe, for an instant, that the world had been set to applause. (hyperbole 1) His hospitality, which seemed to flow as inexhaustibly as tidewater, masked a solitude so immense that sometimes it felt as if he were the last man on an island with an audience that did not see him. (hyperbole 2) I, who have prided myself on being within and without, who reserve judgement when the world calls for haste, found in his loneliness a thing that unnerved me more than any scandal. (expression similar to his voice 1: "within and without"; expression similar to his voice 2: "reserve judgement")

Daisy — ah, Daisy. (relationship with Daisy) If Gatsby was a carved monument to hope, Daisy was the soft and mutable thing that hope had always set its face toward. She had a voice that came to him, in his memory, like money; it was music and transaction both, light in a hand that could dispense favors and wound with equal grace. (metaphor 5) The afternoons I spent in her drawing-room, watching the sunlight melt into the green light across the water, I was struck by a contradiction: she was both exquisitely delicate and at the same time, in her moods, capable of a kind of casual cruelty that left one dazed. (extended example: Daisy — detailed experience paragraph 1) Once, when she laughed at a story I was telling, the sound rolled through the room like a small bell and seemed to clean the air of impurity; another time, when she spoke of her child in a bored, distracted voice, I felt the summer wind shift in a way that was unmistakably ominous. Her carelessness — a phrase I do not employ lightly — was the engine of so much that followed; the careless people smashed things up then retreated into their money or their palaces or their indifferent smiles. (expression similar to his voice 3: "careless people"; extended example: Daisy paragraph 2)

Tom I knew in the terms in which he wished to be known: strength by inheritance and opinion by right. (relationship with Tom) He moved through his world like a man who believed his hands made the world and it would obey him: a bull of the old country displaced to a new pasture. (simile/metaphor 6) With Tom there was always the sensation of concealment that is part of brute force — he had the sort of moral opacity that we used to think belonged to fortresses. Once, in a car, his voice came to me like the rumble of a business engine; he spoke of power as one would speak of weather. (extended example: Tom — detailed experience paragraph)

Jordan was a light, a slanting, mildly cynical light; she belonged to that new class of women who were more amused than she ought to have been by the follies around her. (relationship with Jordan) She was erect and cool, like a photograph, and I suspect she believed in her own invulnerability because it made her less obliged to explain herself. (simile) I admired her for her detachment and feared for her because detachment is only reserve with a different name. (expression similar to his voice 4: "reserve")

There is a moral to this ledger I am keeping for myself tonight. (purpose) The great theme that keeps returning to me like a summons is the American dream — that brilliant, restless striving after something that can be named prosperity, love, position — and the terrible way it burns people up when they pursue it as Gatsby did. (thematic topic: American Dream) The green light, which once seemed only an emblem of distance, is now to me an accusation. It says: they wanted, they wanted, and in wanting they became something other than what they were. (symbol: green light)

You will forgive the hyperbole of my mood when I say that the summer's events left the world tilted; it was as if a great balance had been tipped and the coins spilled out in a bright, ugly shower. (hyperbole 2 reiterated) I am weary of being the chronicler of such small cruelties and sublime delusions. I have been inside and outside more times than I had any right to be, and the knowledge of that dual vision has left me a man who sees too much and smiles at whatever he must. (closing; expression similar to his voice 1 repeated: "inside and outside"/"within and without")

I will go back, very soon, to my own country, to the places where men do not cover their faces with laughter at midnight and where a man's history is not a thing he can buy or counterfeit. (closing; purpose) But I shall not forget — for I am a man who remembers — the odd, incandescent tragedy of those I knew this season, and the green light that burned like a small altar across the water. (symbol & thematic topic)

— Nick Carraway (signature)