Today in class we continued discussing tragedies. Yesterday we worked in groups to look closer at chapter seven and the highs and lows for each character. There were two objectives today dealing with tragedy, IWBAT romantic and modern qualities of tragedy, and IWBAT evaluate how suffering varies by social class. Within the different groups yesterday everyone focused on different sections of the chapter and the tragedies taking place for each character during that part. Today the groups were split so everyone can have a larger discussion based on things that happened throughout the whole chapter and get all of the perspectives in order to answer two discussion questions. The first question was, “who are our most tragic characters?”. I thought my group had an interesting point of view on this. We mainly agreed that Daisy and Gatsby together had a terrible fall. This chapter started with them being in love and affectionate all day even in front of Tom. Gatsby was everything but afraid of Tom. Yet, when Daisy admitted she had loved Tom at one point that changed everything for him. From that point on the rest of the chapter showed their relationship on the rocks, as Daisy goes home to atom and gets comforted by him. With that as a class we talked about Gatsby’s tragic flaw, his obsessive behavior. The second question we had to answer was, “how does suffering vary in social class?”. My group recognized the difference in how each character reacted to being hurt during their low point and how that could be related to their social class. For example, Tom took quite a few hits this chapter, but he still has success without Daisy and without Myrtle. He could find another wife, and be happy. Wilson on the other hand, lost his wife when he was just planning on leaving with her, he now has nothing. Unlike Tom it was very clear that Wilson was hurting, he seemed almost broken because there is no hope. After each group answered these two questions we discussed as a class and made interesting points that revealed more about each character and their personalities and flaws.


“Achilles Heel” similar to a person’s personal flaw, in which it will lead to their downfall.