February 12 & 13, 2025
Agenda
Starter: 2/12 & 2/13
Directions: Generations of fans have celebrated Fitzgerald’s style in The Great Gatsby — his rambling, unpredictable sentences, the juxtaposition of informality and elegiac descriptions, the ambiguity of Nick’s reflections, and so on.
Today we focus on Fitzgerald’s style when it comes to dialogue. How do the characters talk in The Great Gatsby? The dialogue in The Great Gatsby contains subtext (deceit, ambiguity, irony, and implication). Fitzgerald explicitly notes this phenomenon when everyone hears Daisy tell Gatsby “I love you,” when she really says, “You always look so cool.” This reflects the nuances of speech in real life.
Analyze the dialogue in The Great Gatsby to recognize the subtext — what is meant but not said.
Read Gatsby Chapter 7 and complete the assignment.
Directions: Each person must randomly draw five playing cards. While we read Gatsby Chapter 7, you will be prompted to complete the task assigned on the playing card during various portions of the chapter. Write your response to the task on the hexagon next to it. At the end, you and your table will create a hexagonal thinking web showing connections between different aspects of the novel.
