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Notes on The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1
Characters Introduced:
* Nick Carraway - A wealthy mid-westerner in his mid-twenties who fought in world war one, currently working in New York city and living next door to Mr.Gastby.
* Daisy - Nick's second cousin is very cynical and bored with the rich life, married to Tom Buchanan.
* Tom Buchanan - Nick's friend from Yale, very wealthy and successful, and very pretentious.
* Jordan Baker - A golfer who spends time with the Buchanan's, also very snooty.
Literary Period:
* "I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War"(7) - World War One is spoken of as the great war
* "Just as things grow in fast movies"(8) - Stop motion movies were a novelty at that time.
* Everybody invests or talks about stocks.
Style:
* Complex wording and sentence structure: "But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone - he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling."(25)
Characterization:
* "It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."(17) - Tom claims to very educated, but he speaks incorrectly, saying "proved" instead of "proven"
* "Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart." - Sums up Tom's attitude; he wants to be better than someone, so he finds snooty books with illogical ideas to back up his racist feeling of superiority.
Literary Devices:
* "secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew"(8) - allusion to King Midas and other fables.
* "their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."(12) - simile.
* "on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon"(12) - simile
* "as if each speech is in arrangement of notes that will never be played again."(13) - simile.
Summary: The author, Nick Carraway moves to the New York area to become a bond man. He spends the afternoon with his second cousin, Daisy, and her husband Tom Buchanan, who are very wealthy, and the evening is filled with a lot of talk about nothing, except that Tom has a mistress somewhere.