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:
• Re-write a scene from the novel SOMEWHERE IN TH EMIDDLE OF THE BOOK NOT AFTER THE ENDING

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 1919 — West Egg, my little weather-beaten cottage, the morning after the rain-driven reunion. (physically) I write with my collar still damp from the wind that came off Gatsby's lawn, and with my mind as unsettled as the whitewashed fence across the bay. (mentally) The lamp beside me casts a narrow circle over the page, as if to keep my thoughts in quarantine from the wide, insolent world outside; I find it necessary, for I am inclined to reserve all judgments, and yet I have been set to judge myself. (Nick-like expression)

It is curious how certain houses, like certain faces, will arrest you in the middle of an afternoon and make you hold your breath. Gatsby's house looked last night like an opal set in a blinking fist of rain; he stood upon the lawn with a wet handkerchief in his hand and a face that could have been carved out of the very marble of his own imagination. (simile) The whole affair—our little contrivance of arranging a meeting between two people who might have been lovers or might have been strangers to one another for five years—ambled along as if it were some gentle, ridiculous play rehearsed by children. (metaphor) I had driven up the road with a sober, bookish sort of awkwardness, like a schoolboy invited into a drawing-room where the conversation was always slightly beyond him. (simile)

Before I went to West Egg I had been a Midwesterner who believed in the decencies; my father had taught me to be careful with my words and my hands, to 'whistle' at the face of extravagance but never to spit upon it. (how he became the way he is) I came East in search of something — I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known — and in that confession there has been lodged both a comfort and a blemish. (Nick-like expression) I have been uneasy about Gatsby's eagerness and Daisy's softness; both of them are instruments of a past which I am beginning to suspect none of us truly possesses. (idea)

Gatsby arrived at my house as if propelled by a tide of feeling. "I wanted to show her," he said to me in a tone that was equal parts command and supplication. (dialogue) "I wanted everything to be exactly right." (dialogue) He had the air of a man who believed the world could be arranged like a bouquet, so that every petal would lie where one wanted it to. (metaphor) His nervousness seemed to make the very air itself tremble—so much so that I thought the rain had been sent to wash the whole country clean of something older than it. (hyperbole) He kept glancing at the dark stretch of water and, once, through the rain, toward the green light at the end of Daisy's dock; that faint green star burned in his eyes like a single desperate promise. (symbol) (simile)

Daisy came up the path with Jordan, who is more a creature of an amused and mobile world than I am; Jordan's mouth was set in that flat, a little cynical line she wears when she means to be frank. (relationship: Jordan) "You are odd to make him wait," she said, half smiling. (dialogue) She called me "old sport" at first, and then, ashamed, corrected herself; she has a way of saying things as if she were distributing favors, and always expects them to be taken. (Nick-like expression) She moved like light across a book—flitting, half-understood, and leaving a residue of curiosity behind. (simile) I have found myself attached to her amusement as to a small, bright lamp that will not ask very much of me. (relationship: Jordan)

When Daisy and Gatsby stood before one another the scene could have been played upon a stage in which all the props were borrowed from the heart. (metaphor) "Gatsby!" she murmured, and the sound she made was like a bell struck in a room that had been emptied for years. (simile) For an instant I believed in miracles; the very world seemed to pulse to that single, fragile note. (hyperbole) He offered her flowers as if he had always been a gardener of rare and impossible blooms, and she laughed with a softness that struck me as both genuine and unbearably rehearsed. (simile)

We went upstairs and sat in my little drawing-room where the furniture still smelled faintly of lemon; Gatsby kept staring at Daisy as if the light would illumine some secret he had installed in her. (physically) I found myself the confidant of a confidence I had not asked for; my own modest house had become the stage for a drama of two large hearts that had been kept apart by time and cowardice. (idea) "I thought you'd be a great deal older," Daisy said, giving him the sort of little put-downs she reserves for those she counts as possible burdens. (dialogue) He laughed and then he fell silent, and in that silence I heard a thousand evenings foretold and a thousand Saturdays that would not come to pass. (metaphor)

There is no act so pitiful as the display of wealth when used to buy back a past. (theme: the corruption of the American Dream/illusion vs. reality) Gatsby laid about him the trophies of his achievement—each luxury a pledge that the past might be rescinded—and Daisy, who had been polished to the luster of a fashionable trinket, handled them as one might handle a mercilessly pretty, but fragile, glass. (symbol: Gatsby's shirts) She opened a drawer and laughed at his shirts with a kind of helpless delight. "They're such beautiful shirts," she cried. (dialogue) "It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful things." Her tears were odd, and they were fulsome, as if made by someone who had at long last been permitted to look at a collection of splendid things and to see in them not value but the memory of what she might have been. (relationship: Daisy) (extended example)

Gatsby's story, which I had glimpsed in fragments like a picture seen through Venetian blinds, took on a whole new outline last night; he is at once the bravest and the most foolish man I have known. (relationship: Gatsby) (extended example) I remember the first time I saw him at one of his parties, an almost spectral figure who stood alone at the edge of his own abundance. (simile) Last night he was the opposite: a man astir with an inward light, all the gauds and trappings reduced to mere signposts along the road to a single destination—Daisy. (metaphor) He spoke to me more plainly than I had expected. "She doesn't like her life now," he whispered once, as if confiding a state secret. (dialogue) I could see how he had built and rehearsed a life of fascinating illusions, and how those illusions had hardened into the architecture of his being. (idea)

As for Tom—(relationship: Tom) he remains the emblem of a careless, imperious order. He did not attend our little reunion, but his shadow lay across the room as surely as if he had sat in the armchair and scowled. (metaphor) When I think of him I think of bulldog tenacity, of a man who holds the world like a leash and shakes it from time to time to show that he can. (simile) He is the kind of person to whom nothing of importance would ever seem to happen unless he were the cause or the victim of it; such certainty is either a curse or a refuge, I have not yet decided which. (Nick-like expression)

I am left with questions that will not take rest. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock still burns in my mind as if it were the single determining star of a sky I had thought wide with possibility. (symbol) Has Gatsby the right to flatter himself with that light? Are our hopes but reflections of our own making? (theme: illusion vs. reality) I find it difficult to reconcile the simple honesty of my own upbringing with the theatricalities of the lives around me; perhaps I would be less troubled if I had not seen so many people make of their luxuries a kind of prayer. (idea)

Before I close this entry I must admit a small vanity: that in arranging their meeting I felt something like a conductor, and I liked the feeling both for its power and its guilt. (Nick-like expression) There was in me, last night, an eagerness to do right and a cowardice that shrank from the consequences. (mentally) I can describe the moment again for myself as if it were a photograph—the rain-soaked bushes; the humble lamplight; Gatsby's hand upon the doorknob; Daisy's breath like an answering chord—but these descriptions are only the shutters of a deeper scene whose details I cannot unpick without betraying the fragile machinery of hope. (metaphor)

Gatsby said, at one point, "I can't help what's been," and Daisy answered, "I know," as if that were both apology and absolution. (dialogue) Jordan looked at me with the knowing little look she gives when she imagines me as half the spectator and half the fool. (dialogue) I suppose that is the place I always occupy—half in the ringside and half in the moral gallery, inclined to be patient and yet sometimes so impatient that the edges of my good intentions bruise. (Nick-like expression)

I will go down to the dock this afternoon and watch the light, though perhaps I watch it because I am afraid to look at what it reveals. (physically) There are lines in all our lives which, once crossed, cannot be retraced; this is a truth I have felt in my bones since my father taught me to be careful with my hands and my words. (how he became the way he is) If I have taken upon myself the role of chronicler, let it be known that I do not do so from pride but because I prefer to be the one who remembers rather than the one who forgets. (idea)

And yet, in spite of everything, there is still in me a sort of romantic readiness to believe that certain things may yet be set right—though the world is larger, and more indifferent, than that small hope would have it. (Nick-like expression) The rain has stopped now. Outside, the air is clean, but the things that happened in the dark rooms of last night hang about me like a perfume that will not evaporate. (metaphor)

—Nick Carraway