Today, Mr. Rivers informed us of a change that has been made. We are no longer having the summative assessment on Tuesday and Wednesday. Instead, we will spend those two days rewriting a section from The Great Gatsby from a different character’s point of view. We are going to be allowed to work either by ourselves or in groups for that project. It will be explained more next week. The summative has been moved to Thursday and Friday.
After that, we discussed the ending of The Great Gatsby, with Nick’s final walk to Gatsby’s house, and how this scene further enhanced the tragedy. Gatsby was seemingly forgotten by everyone except for Nick, because the grass was overgrown and nobody else was there except for Nick. Nick did not enjoy Gatsby’s parties at the time, but now that it is in the past, he misses them. He was longing for the past, just like Gatsby always was.
The last line of this novel is very significant:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
This sentence is metaphorical. People try to push forward towards their goals, but the current prevents them from moving forward. In the case of Gatsby, the current (which represents reality) was pushing him towards the future, but he was refusing to accept reality and instead was desperately trying to move back to the past, towards Daisy. This was his tragic flaw, because he thought Daisy was his future, but he was actually moving in the wrong direction.
Then, we wrote a theme for The Great Gatsby. Remember that a topic is a subject or idea in the text, and a theme is a claim about that topic. This is what we came up with:
Topic: the past
Theme: People want to go back to the past, but they often forget about the bad things that happened.
Gatsby was so obsessed with trying to go back to the past and make his fantasy come true, that he ignored reality.
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