Gatsby's smile

"Gatsby's smile had a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life....It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself." (48)

This quote shows how Gatsby had a way with people. He was charming and people were amazed by him. It also gives the reader a little more insight into society in the 20's. It shows that people were more superficial and that even in a time when they were all focused on parties and drinking that they would take time to notice something as simple as Gatsby's smile. Gatsby wasn't like others. He has a real human quality about him that was something to be noticed.

My version:
The view of the beautiful mountains and hills and a peaceful feel to it, it had a way of making you forget all of your problems and see what is really important. It made you see a new side of yourself and it changed you.

Summertime

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer” (4).

Fitzgerald has done a rare thing, to combine beauty of language and depth of thought so skillfully.  It's a magnificent descriptive sentence about how exciting the summer is going to be and it references the variety of life and hope that Nick Carraway is about to experience. He compares sunshine and growth to a new chapter in his life. It is also showing how this book is going to be different and mysterious, which makes the readers want to keep reading. The Great Gatsby is really one of those pieces where every single line is gorgeous.

My version:

And so as the wind grew colder, the nights were longer and the leaves fell down, I figured that life was going to change as the wrath of winter approached.

partyyyyyy

"The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light."

The sentence is a long one that describes the type of people at Gatsby's party. He talks of the different guests and their different voices and personalities.


Throughout the night, people come and go as nomads; flower petals float all around just as the women dressed to the nines, characters and attitudes change almost as inconsistently as the weather.

He was as sensitive as a... seismograph?

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away."

I liked the way the sentence was organized. It combined phrases filled with descriptive words and similes and segmented them so that it could create on great Gatsbian sentence. I especially like how Fitzgerald found a way to compare a person to a seismograph of all things. 

If a crowd is a thriving mass of energies carried by the throng of people, then there is something vivacious about this one in particular, a seemingly infinite amount of life flows through these people, as if they were akin to a dam that had endless amounts of water flowing through it.

This is a Valley of Ashes...

This is a valley of ashes a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. 

I like this sentence because it make something that represents destruction seem like something that represents growth. When I think of the word "ash" I think of fire or a volcano eruption. However, Fitzgerald relates the word "ash" to a farm and crops, and houses' chimneys releasing smoke, but he also relates it to men who are corrupt, damaged and depressed. I think Fitzgerald was trying to show how all the "stuff"of this time was good but the people were not.

My Version:

This is a prosperous time with new technologies and all the industry and development is great, but it is all happening by way of men and women who are depressed and morally decaying and it is causing society to crumble.

Sentence Style

"No- Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."

I particularly liked this sentence because of it's structure- the first part is short and simplistic and the second part is complex and long. I also like some of the phrases in the sentences such as "wake of his dreams," and "short-winded elations of men."

My sentence:

Yes- we made it out with our lives intact; yet, it was our souls, the conscience that lives beyond the mortal musing of bone and sinew, that would lay forever stretched on that sacred ground that glorious and blood hungry men had died for.

The Pretty Good Gatsby?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer devoted to revision and rewriting. He anguished over the title of The Great Gatsby and was never pleased with it. Fitzgerald considered these alternate titles:

Gold-hatted Gatsby
The High Bouncing Lover
Trimalchio in West Egg
Ash Heaps and Millionaires
Under the Red White and Blue

The first two titles refer to the epigraph at the beginning of the novel, which was written by Fitzgerald but attributed to one of his characters. Trimalchio was a thrower of parties in Ancient Rome.

Fitzgerald was equally famous for his sentence craft. He wrote some of the most beautiful and provocative sentences in the English language. For today's post, pick a sentence from one of the first four chapters of The Great Gatsby. Explain why you chose it and why it spoke to you. Then try to imitate the sentence's structure (and tone, if you like) in a sentence of your own.

Here's one I especially like.

"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars" (43).

It's a typical Gatsbian sentence with an incongruous reference to color and of course champagne and secrets. The simile of the moths is evocative of the party-goers, who are temporary, insubstantial, and drawn to the literal and figurative light of Gatsby's parties. 

Here's my version:

On their silver Christmas boys and girls rolled and scampered like new puppies among the anticipations and the sugar cookies and the paper ribbons.