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Reading skills and strategies
Reading skills and strategies
The purpose of reading comprehension skills
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I have read a multitude of books, stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, unable to put down the latest addition to my literary collection. I have learned imperative lessons of compassion and valor, grieved after the deaths of my favourite characters and grinned after their triumphs. There is, however, a single novel that my brain still ponders over, day and night, a novel I am sure will remain with me until I am old and grey; F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 story, The Great Gatsby.
I remember opening the worn library copy of the book, eager to start. The spine cracked and bent, the smell of aged paper filled my nose, just as any other old book before. Little did I know that this 180-page novel was about to change my life forever. I was completely
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It is a story about love and hate, about loyalty and disloyalty, about appearance and reality. Fitzgerald’s novel encapsulates and symbolizes 1920s America in its entirety, in particular, the loss of the American dream in an era of prodigious success and material lavishness.
The Great Gatsby is narrated by recent Yale graduate and bond salesman, Nick Carraway, his thoughts and perceptions giving colour to the story. Nick has recently relocated to New York, renting a house next door to an eccentric millionaire, who he comes to know as Jay Gatsby. At one of Gatsby’s seemingly never-ending parties, Nick finds out about the past tumultuous relationship between none other than Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s cousin and friend Tom Buchanan’s wife.
When Gatsby made his first appearance at one of his lavish parties, I was instantly captivated. Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald tells Gatsby’s real story, a story about a poor boy named Jimmy Gatz who left his family in search of something bigger, something brighter. This something is found in a woman and in fortune. Gatsby's journey leads him from impoverishment to opulence, into the embrace of his dearest, and ultimately to his
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway. Nick tells the story of the things he experienced when he moved to New York City to work in the bonds business. The reader is told the story, which includes Nick’s perception and opinion in certain events. The reader wants to believe that Nick is a reliable narrator and he seems to be one, in the beginning. Nick describes himself as “one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (Fitzgerald, 59). Although, Nick thinks this of himself, there are many things in the story that hint otherwise. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick is not a reliable narrator. This is seen through his negative judgments of others, his friendship with Gatsby, and because he does not know everything about Daisy and Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby is a novel narrated by Nick Caraway, Jay Gatsby’s true lone friend. Jay Gatsby is an affluent gentleman;
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby provides the reader with a unique outlook on the life of the newly rich. Gatsby is an enigma and a subject of great curiosity, furthermore, he is content with a lot in life until he strives too hard. His obsession with wealth, his lonely life and his delusion allow the reader to sympathize with him.
When looking at Jay Gatsby, one sees many different personalities and ideals. There is the gracious host, the ruthless bootlegger, the hopeless romantic, and beneath it all, there is James Gatz of North Dakota. The many faces of Gatsby make a reader question whether they truly know Gatsby as a person. Many people question what exactly made Jay Gatsby so “great.” These different personas, when viewed separately, are quite unremarkable in their own ways. When you take them together, however, you discover the complicated and unique individual that is Jay Gatsby.
Dubbed the ‘roaring 20s’, because of the massive rise in America’s economy, this social and historical context is widely remembered for its impressive parties and sensationalist attitude. However, Fitzgerald also conveys a more sinister side to this culture through numerous affairs, poverty and a rampage of organised crime. By exposing this moral downfall, Fitzgerald reveals to the responder his value of the American dream and his belief of its decline. As a writer, Fitzgerald was always very much concerned with the present times, consequently, his writing style and plot reflects his own experiences of this era. So similar were the lives of Fitzgerald’s characters to his own that he once commented, “sometimes I don't know whether Zelda (his wife) and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels”. In 1924, Fitzgerald was affected by Zelda’s brief affair with a young French pilot, provoking him to lock her in their house. A construction of this experience can be seen in the way Fitzgerald depicts the 1290s context. For example in ‘The Great Gatsby’, there are numerous affairs and at one point, Mr Wilson locks up his wife to pre...
The Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, was first published in 1925. It is a tale of love, loss, and betrayal set in New York in the mid 1920’s. It follows Nick Carraway, the narrator, who moves to Long Island where he spends time with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and meets his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Nick can be viewed as the voice of reason in this novel. He is a static character that readers can rely on to tell the truth, as he sees it. But not only the readers rely on him. Daisy, Gatsby, Tom, and Jordan all confide in him and trust that he will do the right thing. Nick Carraway is the backbone of the book and its main characters.
“The Great Gatsby” is a book about Jay Gatz, as narrated by Nick Carraway. I believe the story has a good a number of literary archetypes that helped make it a little more interesting than it already is. We follow Nick for the most part, but Gatsby or James Gatz is the more important character in the story, as it all has to do with him. He’s essentially chasing after a girl he met right before he joined the army, she goes by the name Daisy Buchanan. She happens to be Nick Carraway’s cousin, which is why Gatsby spent a lot of time with Nick. Without Nick Gatsby probably would’ve never gotten the chance to be reintroduced to Daisy.
The 1920’s was a time of great change to both the country lived in as well as the goals and ambitions that were sought after by the average person. During this time, priorities shifted from family and religion to success and spontaneous living. The American dream, itself, changed into a self centered and ongoing personal goal that was the leading priority in most people’s lives. This new age of carelessness and naivety encompasses much of what this earlier period is remembered for. In addition, this revolution transformed many of the great writers and authors of the time as well as their various works. The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, perfectly symbolizes many emergent trends of the 1920’s. More importantly the character of Jay Gatsby is depicted as a man amongst his American dream and the trials he faces in the pursuit of its complete achievement. His drive for acquiring the girl of his dreams, Daisy Buchanan, through gaining status and wealth shows many aspects of the authors view on the American dream. Through this, one can hope to disassemble the complex picture that is Fitzgerald’s view of this through the novel. Fitzgerald believes, through his experiences during the 1920’s, that only fractions of the American Dream are attainable, and he demonstrates this through three distinct images in The Great Gastby.
Furthermore, this was the prohibition era, which meant that alcohol and the consumption of alcohol was illegal. After this brief look into Gatsby’s life, one can understand why he was considered “great”, but to truly understand Gatsby’s greatness, one must look into his past. As a boy, James Gatz was self-disciplined in his daily life, to help ensure he did everything in his power to achieve great things in his future. Upon meeting Gatsby’s father, Nick Carraway learned that James had run away from home, inducing a short-lived sadness in Mr. Gatz.
“Money can’t buy happiness” is a saying that is often used to make one understand that there is more to life than wealth and money. Jay Gatsby was a man of many qualities some of which are good and bad. Throughout the book of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, we learn of his past and discover the true qualities of Jay Gatsby. Starting from the bottom, with little money, we learn of why Gatsby struggled so hard all his life to become wealthy and what his true goal in life was. When reading this story, the true reasons behind Gatsby’s illegal actions reveal themselves and readers can learn a great life lesson from this story and the actions the characters take. Readers can see through Gatsby’s contradictions of actions and thoughts that illustrate the theme of the story, along with his static characteristics, that all humans are complex beings and that humans cannot be defined as good or bad.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is about Nick Caraway, a man who moved into New York in West Egg. He soon finds out that his house borders a mansion of a wealthy man, named Jay Gatsby, who is in love with Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchannan. Nick describes his past experiences with Gatsby. He is an unreliable first person narrator, for he is extremely subjective being biased towards Gatsby and he is deceptive, with his lying and past actions. His evaluation of Gatsby is not entirely just, due to his close friendship with Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway (Toby Maguire), helps reunite lost loves Jay Gatsby, his neighbour (Leonardo DiCarprio), and Daisy Buchanan, his cousin (Carey Mulligan). Only in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation, Carraway tells the story from inside a sanitarium, where he is taken to writing it all down as a form of therapy. Fitzgerald’s Nick refers to Gatsby as “the man who gives his name to this novel”, so the form of The Great Gatsby text written by Nick is almost the same as Luhrmann’s film and he expresses deeper into the story than Fitzgerald. In the film Luhrmann showed us how Nick was writing the tale by hand, then typing, and finally amassing his completed manuscript. He gives the name Gatsby ...
Jay Gatsby is the epitome of a tragic hero; his greatest attribute of enterprise and ambition contributes to his ultimate demise, but his tragic story inspires fear amongst the audience and showcases the dangers of allowing money to consume one’s life. To qualify as a tragic hero, the character must first occupy a "high" status position and also embody virtue as part of his innate character. In Fitzgerald’s novel, the tragic hero Jay Gatsby was not born into wealth but later acquired social status through bootlegging, or selling illegal alcohol during Prohibition. When he was a child, James “Jimmy” Gatz was a nave boy from North Dakota without any family connections, money, or education who was determined to escape his family’s poverty through hard work and determination. Once he enrolls in the army, however, Gatsby gets “’way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care” (151) when he meets who he believes to be the girl of his dreams—Daisy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most compelling twentieth century writers, (Curnutt, 2004). The year 1925 marks the year of the publication of Fitzgerald’s most credited novel, The Great Gatsby (Bruccoli, 1985). With its critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream (Berman, 1996), this dramatic idyllic novel, (Harvey, 1957), although poorly received at first, is now highly regarded as Fitzgerald’s finest work (Rohrkemper, 1985) and is his publisher, Scribner 's most popular title, (Donahue, 2013). The novel achieved it’s status as one of the most influential novels in American history around the nineteen fifties and sixties, over ten years after Fitzgerald 's passing, (Ibid, 1985)
A seemingly easy read, The Great Gatsby has won over critics around the world, and rightfully so, has become one of today's greatest classics due to its complex literary content. The narrator of the novel, Nick Carraway, grew up in the Midwestern United States and went to school at Yale University. Returning home after traveling a great deal, he is discontent and decides to move to the East in 1922, renting a house in Long Island's West Egg section. Jay Gatsby is a wealthy neighbor living next door in a lavish mansion where he holds many extravagant weekend parties. His name is mentioned while Nick is visiting a relative, Daisy. As it turns out, Jay Gatsby had met Daisy five years before while in the military. Meanwhile Gatsby spent all of his effort after the war to buy his mansion through shady business dealings in order to be nearer to Daisy in the hope that she would leave her rich husband, Tom, for him. Daisy is impressed by Gatsby's wealth and the two begin spending much time together, raising the suspicions of Tom who had also has his own affair with a gas station owner's wife, Myrtle Wilson.