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The first chapter of the book is narrated by Nick, who casts himself as the author of the book. He opens up by telling about how his father taught him reverse judgement about other people, because if he was to hold them up against his own standards, he would misunderstand them.
Nick briefly mentiones Gatsby and presents him as the hero og his story.
Tom tries to interest the others in a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires, written by a man name Goddard. Daisy teases Tom about the book, but is unterrupted when Tom gets up and leaves the room because of a phone call. Daisy follows him, and Jordan says to Nick that the call was from Tom's lover.
When Nick arrives home after the dinner, he spots Gatsby standing on the lawn.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had."

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1:  Cutural and historical context is very important to the produxtion and reception of a text because it gives us an idea of the inspiration behind the work.

2: To approach and understand texts that are from a different time than ours or a different culture is often hard because we don't have the same understanding of the historical or cultural context as the author has. However, we can always search up details about the culture or time period. What is important, but hard for many, is to be openminded.

3: Texts highly offer insight to other cultures or beliefs. This is because we tend to have common knowledge abouth the give culture, but manage to understand it when it is explained as an experience.

4: The meaning and impact of a text changes over time because of the social, intelectual and cultural developments in the human mind. Things that were illegal and unacceptable 50 years ago, are now legal and normalized.

5: -

6: Language strongly represents identities as it shows people's culture, social status, level of education, etc.

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Halfway between West Egg and New York City, there is a gray valley where New York's ashes are dumped. The men that live there work at shoveling up the ashes.
The commuter train that runs between West Egg and New York passes through the valley. One day Nick and Tom are on the train and Tom forces Nick to follow him out of the train at one of the stops. Then, Tom leads Nick to George's garage, which is on the edge of the valley. Tom taunts George and orders Myrtle (George's wife/Tom's lover) to follow him to the train. Then he takes Nick and Myrtle to New York City, to the Morningside Heights apartment that he keeps for his affair. There they have a part with Myrtle's sister and a couple named McKee.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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The Great Gatsby is a novel written in 1925 by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel is set in 1922, in the middle of  the Jazz Age on Long Island.
The overall context of the novel is a reflection of the American Dream in the roaring 20's.
The novel captures the economic crash in America, the development  of the new jazz music and the constant incoming flow of illegal liquor.
Fitzgerald later described this era as "a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure."

Picture: "The Roaring Twenties"

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Tom Buchanan is described as a strong person, both physically and psychologically.
According to Nick's description, Tom has a 'cruel body' and 'enormous power' which he developed as a college athlete.
His marriage with Daisy is troubled, and Tom is described as more of an aggresive type.

Picture: Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" (2013)

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Daisy Buchanan is a beautiful, young woman from Louisville, Kentucky. Daisy is Nick's cousin and in a relationship with Gatsby.
Prior to the beginning of the novel Daisy was a debutante in Louisville, where she was very popular among the military officers, including Gatsby, that were stationed near her home. Gatsby won Daisy's heart  despite the fact that he lied about his childhood and economic issue, and they got into a romantic relationship before Gatsby left to fight in the war. Daisy promised to wait for him, but ended up marrying Tom Buchanan.

Picture: Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby"(2013)

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Miss Baker is a mysterious character and is the first person Nick encounters in the novel. Jordan is presented as a distant, fragile, beautiful and intelligent woman.

Picture: Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker in "The Great Gatsby" (2013)

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The protagonist in the novel is Mr. Gatsby. He is a young man who became successful and wealthy, despite of his inpoverrished childhood.
Gatsby fell in love with Nick's cousin, Daisy, while he was stationed in the military. Unfortunately, they parted ways and Daisy ended up marrying Tom Buchanan.

Picture: Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in "The Great Gatsby" (2013)

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Nick is the narrator of the book. He is a quiet and reflective young man from Minnesota who lives next door to Gatsby.
In the novel, he is Daisy's cousin.
Nick is well suited for the role as narrator because of the romantic relationship Gatsby and Daisy have. This results in the story being presented as Nicks expriences with Gatsby.
Nevertheless, he presents himself as a good listener who is quiet and open-minded. This results in people trusting him with their secrets.

Picture: Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway in "The Great Gatsby" (2013)

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The narrative point of view in the novel is first person. This might make the story seem a little one-sided, and the reader might assume that the story is perhaps sugar coated.
The language in the book is not complicated, but it is not the modern English we speak today. Therefore, it can take a little time to get used to the structure of the sentences and choice of words.
There is some tension in the book already at the beginning.

Picture: The cover of the novel

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The theme in a novel is something deeper than the plot or the events in the novel. The theme is kind of like a lesson.
We can work out the theme by asking ourselves a couple of questions, for instance: 'What do the characters do?' or 'What do the characters learn from their actions?'

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Some themes emerging in the novel are:

-The American dream in the 20s
-Upper class
-Romance

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"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat (...) where ashes take the forms of houses (...) "

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Myrtle Wilson is Tom's lover from New York. She is described as a "thickish figure" in her mid- thirties.

Picture: Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson in "The Great Gatsby" (2013)

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George is Myrtle's husband. He is very compareable to Gatsby. He is also the owner of an exhausted owner of a run-down auto shop.

Picture: Jason Clarke as George B. Wilson in "The Great Gatsby" (2013)

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The novel is written at the time when the Amrican economy was crashing which lead to ban on sale and consumption of liquor. Therefore, people started organizing secret parties, and the generation that fought in WWI turned wild and had exterme lifestyles to compensate the shock of the war.

This created a materialistic society where the wealthy people/the upper class was strongly admired. So were women with a sense of power. -During WWI, women were economically independant and they took on jobs while the men were in combat. This eventually lead to the women living financially independant and free, even after the war ended.

Picture: Women in WWI

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The novel refers to many events in Fitzgerald's life. Just like the narrator, Nick, he is a young man from Minnesota. Fitzgerald graduated from an Ivy League school which is a line of elite colleges for athleats in the United States. There he fell in love with Ginevra King, but her family discouraged the relationship because of the diffecence in class. After the rejection he became mentally vulnerable and enlisted in the US Army as a second lieutenant. When he was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre who agreed to marry him. Her parents ended their engagement until he was able to prove his financial success.
After Fitzgerald's success as a novelist and short-story writer, he married Zelda in New York City and moved to Long Island.

Nearly all characters in the novel have one or more traits or backround as Fitzgerald; Gatsby was a young man who fell in love with a woman while stationed in the military and had to prove he was worthy.
Tom Buchanan is presented as an athletic type with a strong and violent temperament which is a character based on William Mitchell whom Ginevra married
The romance between Fitzgerald and Ginevra inspired the character of Daisy.

Picture: F. Scott Fitzgerald

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At midnight, Nick and Jordan go outside to watch the entertainment. They sit at a table with a handsome young man who says that Nick looks familiar to him; they realize that they served in the same division during the war. The man introduces himself as none other than Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s speech is elaborate and formal, and he has a habit of calling everyone “old sport.” As the party progresses, Nick becomes increasingly fascinated with Gatsby. He notices that Gatsby does not drink and that he keeps himself separate from the party, standing alone on the marble steps, watching his guests in silence.

At two o’clock in the morning, as husbands and wives argue over whether to leave, a butler tells Jordan that Gatsby would like to see her. Jordan emerges from her meeting with Gatsby saying that she has just heard something extraordinary. Nick says goodbye to Gatsby, who goes inside to take a phone call from Philadelphia. Nick starts to walk home. On his way, he sees Owl Eyes struggling to get his car out of a ditch. Owl Eyes and another man climb out of the wrecked automobile, and Owl Eyes drunkenly declares that he washes his hands of the whole business.

Nick then proceeds to describe his everyday life, to prove that he does more with his time than simply attend parties. He works in New York City, through which he also takes long walks, and he meets women. After a brief relationship with a girl from Jersey City, Nick follows the advice of Daisy and Tom and begins seeing Jordan Baker. Nick says that Jordan is fundamentally a dishonest person; he even knows that she cheated in her first golf tournament. Nick feels attracted to her despite her dishonesty, even though he himself claims to be one of the few honest people he has ever known.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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Nick lists all of the people who attended Gatsby's parties that summer, a roll call of the nation’s most wealthy and powerful people. He then describes a trip that he took to New York with Gatsby to eat lunch. As they drive to the city, Gatsby tells Nick about his past, but his story seems highly improbable. He claims, for instance, to be the son of wealthy, deceased parents from the Midwest. When Nick asks which Midwestern city he is from, Gatsby replies, “San Francisco.” Gatsby then lists a long and preposterously detailed set of accomplishments: he claims to have been educated at Oxford, to have collected jewels in the capitals of Europe, to have hunted big game, and to have been awarded medals in World War I by multiple European countries. Seeing Nick’s skepticism, Gatsby produces a medal from Montenegro and a picture of himself playing cricket at Oxford.

Gatsby’s car speeds through the valley of ashes and enters the city. When a policeman pulls Gatsby over for speeding, Gatsby shows him a white card, and the policeman apologizes for bothering him. In the city, Gatsby takes Nick to lunch and introduces him to Meyer Wolfsheim, who, he claims, was responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series. Wolfsheim is a shady character with underground business connections. He gives Nick the impression that the source of Gatsby’s wealth might be unsavory, and that Gatsby may even have ties to the sort of organized crime with which Wolfsheim is associated.

After the lunch in New York, Nick sees Jordan Baker, who finally tells him the details of her mysterious conversation with Gatsby at the party. She relates that Gatsby told her that he is in love with Daisy. According to Jordan, during the war, before Daisy married Tom, she was a beautiful young girl in Louisville, Kentucky, and all the military officers in town were in love with her. Daisy fell in love with Lieutenant Jay Gatsby, who was stationed at the base near her home. Though she chose to marry Tom after Gatsby left for the war, Daisy drank herself into numbness the night before her wedding, after she received a letter from Gatsby. Daisy has apparently remained faithful to her husband throughout their marriage, but Tom has not. Jordan adds that Gatsby bought his mansion in West Egg solely to be near Daisy.

Nick remembers the night he saw Gatsby stretching his arms out to the water and realizes that the green light he saw was the light at the end of Daisy’s dock. According to Jordan, Gatsby has asked her to convince Nick to arrange a reunion between Gatsby and Daisy. Because he is terrified that Daisy will refuse to see him, Gatsby wants Nick to invite Daisy to tea. Without Daisy’s knowledge, Gatsby intends to come to the tea at Nick’s house as well, surprising her and forcing her to see him.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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Nick comes home from the city after a date with Jordan. He is surprised to see Gatsby’s mansion lit up brightly, but it seems to be unoccupied, as the house is totally silent. As Nick walks home, Gatsby startles him by approaching him from across the lawn. Gatsby seems agitated and almost desperate to make Nick happy—he invites him to Coney Island, then for a swim in his pool. Nick realizes that Gatsby is nervous because he wants Nick to agree to his plan of inviting Daisy over for tea. Nick tells Gatsby that he will help him with the plan. Overjoyed, Gatsby immediately offers to have someone cut Nick’s grass. He also offers him the chance to make some money by joining him in some business he does on the side—business that does not involve Meyer Wolfshiem. Nick is slightly offended that Gatsby wants to pay him for arranging the meeting with Daisy and refuses Gatsby’s offers, but he still agrees to call Daisy and invite her to his house.

It rains on the day of the meeting, and Gatsby becomes terribly nervous. Despite the rain, Gatsby sends a gardener over to cut Nick’s grass and sends another man over with flowers. Gatsby worries that even if Daisy accepts his advances, things between them will not be the same as they were in Louisville. Daisy arrives, but when Nick brings her into the house, he finds that Gatsby has suddenly disappeared. There is a knock at the door. Gatsby enters, having returned from a walk around the house in the rain.

At first, Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy is terribly awkward. Gatsby knocks Nick’s clock over and tells Nick sorrowfully that the meeting was a mistake. After he leaves the two alone for half an hour, however, Nick returns to find them radiantly happy—Daisy shedding tears of joy and Gatsby glowing. Outside, the rain has stopped, and Gatsby invites Nick and Daisy over to his house, where he shows them his possessions. Daisy is overwhelmed by his luxurious lifestyle, and when he shows her his extensive collection of English shirts, she begins to cry. Gatsby tells Daisy about his long nights spent outside, staring at the green light at the end of her dock, dreaming about their future happiness.

Nick wonders whether Daisy can possibly live up to Gatsby’s vision of her. Gatsby seems to have idealized Daisy in his mind to the extent that the real Daisy, charming as she is, will almost certainly fail to live up to his expectations. For the moment, however, their romance seems fully rekindled. Gatsby calls in Klipspringer, a strange character who seems to live at Gatsby’s mansion, and has him play the piano. Klipspringer plays a popular song called “Ain’t We Got Fun?” Nick quickly realizes that Gatsby and Daisy have forgotten that he is there. Quietly, Nick gets up and leaves Gatsby and Daisy alone together.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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The rumors about Gatsby continue to circulate in New York and a reporter even travels to Gatsby’s mansion hoping to interview him. Having learned the truth about Gatsby’s early life sometime before writing his account, Nick now interrupts the story to relate Gatsby’s personal history-not as it is rumored to have occurred, nor as Gatsby claimed it occurred, but as it really happened.

Gatsby was born James Gatz on a North Dakota farm, and though he attended college at St. Olaf in Minnesota, he dropped out after two weeks, loathing the humiliating janitorial work by means of which he paid his tuition. He worked on Lake Superior the next summer fishing for salmon and digging for clams. One day, he saw a yacht owned by Dan Cody, a wealthy copper mogul, and rowed out to warn him about an impending storm. The grateful Cody took young Gatz, who gave his name as Jay Gatsby, onboard his yacht as his personal assistant.

Traveling with Cody to the Barbary Coast and the West Indies, Gatsby fell in love with wealth and luxury. Cody was a heavy drinker, and one of Gatsby’s jobs was to look after him during his drunken binges. This gave Gatsby a healthy respect for the dangers of alcohol and convinced him not to become a drinker himself. When Cody died, he left Gatsby $25,000, but Cody’s mistress prevented him from claiming his inheritance. Gatsby then dedicated himself to becoming a wealthy and successful man.

Nick sees neither Gatsby nor Daisy for several weeks after their reunion at Nick’s house. Stopping by Gatsby’s house one afternoon, he is alarmed to find Tom Buchanan there. Tom has stopped for a drink at Gatsby’s house with Mr. and Mrs. Sloane, with whom he has been out riding. Gatsby seems nervous and agitated, and tells Tom awkwardly that he knows Daisy. Gatsby invites Tom and the Sloanes to stay for dinner, but they refuse. To be polite, they invite Gatsby to dine with them, and he accepts, not realizing the insincerity of the invitation. Tom is contemptuous of Gatsby’s lack of social grace and highly critical of Daisy’s habit of visiting Gatsby’s house alone. He is suspicious, but he has not yet discovered Gatsby and Daisy’s love.

The following Saturday night, Tom and Daisy go to a party at Gatsby’s house. Though Tom has no interest in the party, his dislike for Gatsby causes him to want to keep an eye on Daisy. Gatsby’s party strikes Nick much more unfavorably this time around—he finds the revelry oppressive and notices that even Daisy has a bad time. Tom upsets her by telling her that Gatsby’s fortune comes from bootlegging. She angrily replies that Gatsby’s wealth comes from a chain of drugstores that he owns.

Gatsby seeks out Nick after Tom and Daisy leave the party; he is unhappy because Daisy has had such an unpleasant time. Gatsby wants things to be exactly the same as they were before he left Louisville: he wants Daisy to leave Tom so that he can be with her. Nick reminds Gatsby that he cannot re-create the past. Gatsby, distraught, protests that he can. He believes that his money can accomplish anything as far as Daisy is concerned. As he walks amid the debris from the party, Nick thinks about the first time Gatsby kissed Daisy, the moment when his dream of Daisy became the dominant force in his life. Now that he has her, Nick reflects, his dream is effectively over.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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Preoccupied by his love for Daisy, Gatsby calls off his parties, which were primarily a means to lure Daisy. He also fires his servants to prevent gossip and replaces them with shady individuals connected to Meyer Wolfsheim.

On the hottest day of the summer, Nick takes the train to East Egg for lunch at the house of Tom and Daisy. He finds Gatsby and Jordan there as well. When the nurse brings in Daisy’s baby girl, Gatsby is stunned and can hardly believe that the child is real. For her part, Daisy seems almost uninterested in her child. During the awkward afternoon, Gatsby and Daisy cannot hide their love for one another. Complaining of her boredom, Daisy asks Gatsby if he wants to go into the city. Gatsby stares at her passionately, and Tom becomes certain of their feelings for each other.

Itching for a confrontation, Tom seizes upon Daisy’s suggestion that they should all go to New York together. Nick rides with Jordan and Tom in Gatsby’s car, and Gatsby and Daisy ride together in Tom’s car. Stopping for gas at Wilson’s garage, Nick, Tom, and Jordan learn that Wilson has discovered his wife’s infidelity—though not the identity of her lover—and plans to move her to the West. Under the brooding eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, Nick perceives that Tom and Wilson are in the same position.

In the oppressive New York City heat, the group decides to take a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom initiates his planned confrontation with Gatsby by mocking his habit of calling people “old sport.” He accuses Gatsby of lying about having attended Oxford. Gatsby responds that he did attend Oxford—for five months, in an army program following the war. Tom asks Gatsby about his intentions for Daisy, and Gatsby replies that Daisy loves him, not Tom. Tom claims that he and Daisy have a history that Gatsby could not possibly understand. He then accuses Gatsby of running a bootlegging operation.

Daisy, in love with Gatsby earlier in the afternoon, feels herself moving closer and closer to Tom as she observes the quarrel. Realizing he has bested Gatsby, Tom sends Daisy back to Long Island with Gatsby to prove Gatsby’s inability to hurt him. As the row quiets down, Nick realizes that it is his thirtieth birthday.

Driving back to Long Island, Nick, Tom, and Jordan discover a frightening scene on the border of the valley of ashes. Someone has been fatally hit by an automobile. Michaelis, a Greek man who runs the restaurant next to Wilson’s garage, tells them that Myrtle was the victim—a car coming from New York City struck her, paused, then sped away. Nick realizes that Myrtle must have been hit by Gatsby and Daisy, driving back from the city in Gatsby’s big yellow automobile. Tom thinks that Wilson will remember the yellow car from that afternoon. He also assumes that Gatsby was the driver.

Back at Tom’s house, Nick waits outside and finds Gatsby hiding in the bushes. Gatsby says that he has been waiting there in order to make sure that Tom did not hurt Daisy. He tells Nick that Daisy was driving when the car struck Myrtle, but that he himself will take the blame. Still worried about Daisy, Gatsby sends Nick to check on her. Nick finds Tom and Daisy eating cold fried chicken and talking. They have reconciled their differences, and Nick leaves Gatsby standing alone in the moonlight.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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After the day’s traumatic events, Nick passes a sleepless night. Before dawn, he rises restlessly and goes to visit Gatsby at his mansion. Gatsby tells him that he waited at Daisy's until four o’clock in the morning and that nothing happened—Tom did not try to hurt her and Daisy did not come outside. Nick suggests that Gatsby forget about Daisy and leave Long Island, but Gatsby refuses to consider leaving Daisy behind.

Gatsby, melancholy, tells Nick about courting Daisy in Louisville in 1917. He says that he loved her for her youth and vitality, and idolized her social position, wealth, and popularity. He adds that she was the first girl to whom he ever felt close and that he lied about his background to make her believe that he was worthy of her. Eventually, he continues, he and Daisy made love, and he felt as though he had married her. She promised to wait for him when he left for the war, but then she married Tom, whose social position was solid and who had the approval of her parents.

Gatsby’s gardener interrupts the story to tell Gatsby that he plans to drain the pool. The previous day was the hottest of the summer, but autumn is in the air this morning, and the gardener worries that falling leaves will clog the pool drains. Gatsby tells the gardener to wait a day; he has never used the pool, he says, and wants to go for a swim. Nick has stayed so long talking to Gatsby that he is very late for work. He finally says goodbye to Gatsby. As he walks away, he turns back and shouts that Gatsby is worth more than the Buchanans and all of their friends.

Nick goes to his office, but he feels too distracted to work, and even refuses to meet Jordan Baker for a date. The focus of his narrative then shifts to relate to the reader what happened at the garage after Myrtle was killed (the details of which Nick learns from Michaelis): George Wilson stays up all night talking to Michaelis about Myrtle. He tells him that before Myrtle died, he confronted her about her lover and told her that she could not hide her sin from the eyes of God.

The morning after the accident, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, illuminated by the dawn, overwhelm Wilson. He believes they are the eyes of God and leaps to the conclusion that whoever was driving the car that killed Myrtle must have been her lover. Wilson decides that God demands revenge and leaves to track down the owner of the car.

Wilson looks for Tom, because he knows that Tom is familiar with the car’s owner—he saw Tom driving the car earlier that day, but he knows Tom could not have been the driver since Tom arrived after the accident in a different car with Nick and Jordan. Wilson eventually goes to Gatsby’s house, where he finds Gatsby lying on an air mattress in the pool, floating in the water and looking up at the sky. Wilson shoots Gatsby, killing him instantly, then shoots himself.

Nick hurries back to West Egg and finds Gatsby floating dead in his pool. Nick imagines Gatsby’s final thoughts, and pictures him disillusioned by the meaninglessness and emptiness of life without Daisy, without his dream.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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Writing two years after Gatsby's death, Nick describes the events that surrounded the funeral. Swarms of reporters, journalists, and gossipmongers descend on the mansion in the aftermath of the murder. Wild, untrue stories, more exaggerated than the rumors about Gatsby when he was throwing his parties, circulate about the nature of Gatsby’s relationship to Myrtle and Wilson. Feeling that Gatsby would not want to go through a funeral alone, Nick tries to hold a large funeral for him, but all of Gatsby’s former friends and acquaintances either have disappeared—Tom and Daisy, for instance, move away with no forwarding address—or refuse to come, like Meyer Wolfsheim and Klipspringer. The latter claims that he has a social engagement in Westport and asks Nick to send along his tennis shoes. Outraged, Nick hangs up on him.

The only people to attend the funeral are Nick, Owl Eyes, a few servants, and Gatsby’s father, Henry C. Gatz, who has come all the way from Minnesota. Henry Gatz is proud of his son and saves a picture of his house. He also fills Nick in on Gatsby’s early life, showing him a book in which a young Gatsby had written a schedule for self-improvement.

Sick of the East and its empty values, Nick decides to move back to the Midwest. He breaks off his relationship with Jordan, who suddenly claims that she has become engaged to another man. Just before he leaves, Nick encounters Tom on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Nick initially refuses to shake Tom’s hand but eventually accepts. Tom tells him that he was the one who told Wilson that Gatsby owned the car that killed Myrtle, and describes how greatly he suffered when he had to give up the apartment he kept in the city for his affair. He says that Gatsby deserved to die. Nick comes to the conclusion that Tom and Daisy are careless and uncaring people and that they destroy people and things, knowing that their money will shield them from ever having to face any negative consequences.

Nick muses that, in some ways, this story is a story of the West, even though it has taken place entirely on the East Coast. Nick, Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all from west of the Appalachians, and Nick believes that the reactions of each, himself included, to living the fast-paced, lurid lifestyle of the East has shaped his or her behavior. Nick remembers life in the Midwest, full of snow, trains, and Christmas wreaths, and thinks that the East seems grotesque and distorted by comparison.

On his last night in West Egg before moving back to Minnesota, Nick walks over to Gatsby’s empty mansion and erases an obscene word that someone has written on the steps. He sprawls out on the beach behind Gatsby’s house and looks up. As the moon rises, he imagines the island with no houses and considers what it must have looked like to the explorers who discovered the New World centuries before.

Nick imagines that America was once a goal for dreamers and explorers, just as Daisy was for Gatsby. He pictures the green land of America as the green light shining from Daisy’s dock, and muses that Gatsby—whose wealth and success so closely echo the American dream—failed to realize that the dream had already ended, that his goals had become hollow and empty.

Nick senses that people everywhere are motivated by similar dreams and by a desire to move forward into a future in which their dreams are realized. Nick envisions their struggles to create that future as boats moving in a body of water against a current that inevitably carries them back into the past.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are prone to garish displays of wealth. Nick’s next-door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night.

Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he attended Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class. Nick drives out to East Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, an erstwhile classmate of Nick’s at Yale. Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship. Nick also learns a bit about Daisy and Tom’s marriage: Jordan tells him that Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley of ashes, a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle. At a vulgar, gaudy party in the apartment that Tom keeps for the affair, Myrtle begins to taunt Tom about Daisy, and Tom responds by breaking her nose.

As the summer progresses, Nick eventually garners an invitation to one of Gatsby’s legendary parties. He encounters Jordan Baker at the party, and they meet Gatsby himself, a surprisingly young man who affects an English accent, has a remarkable smile, and calls everyone “old sport.” Gatsby asks to speak to Jordan alone, and, through Jordan, Nick later learns more about his mysterious neighbor. Gatsby tells Jordan that he knew Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and is deeply in love with her. He spends many nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion. Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle and wild parties are simply an attempt to impress Daisy. Gatsby now wants Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy, but he is afraid that Daisy will refuse to see him if she knows that he still loves her. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house, without telling her that Gatsby will also be there. After an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablish their connection. Their love rekindled, they begin an affair.

After a short time, Tom grows increasingly suspicious of his wife’s relationship with Gatsby. At a luncheon at the Buchanans’ house, Gatsby stares at Daisy with such undisguised passion that Tom realizes Gatsby is in love with her. Though Tom is himself involved in an extramarital affair, he is deeply outraged by the thought that his wife could be unfaithful to him. He forces the group to drive into New York City, where he confronts Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom asserts that he and Daisy have a history that Gatsby could never understand, and he announces to his wife that Gatsby is a criminal—his fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. Daisy realizes that her allegiance is to Tom, and Tom contemptuously sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby, attempting to prove that Gatsby cannot hurt him.

When Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive through the valley of ashes, however, they discover that Gatsby’s car has struck and killed Myrtle, Tom’s lover. They rush back to Long Island, where Nick learns from Gatsby that Daisy was driving the car when it struck Myrtle, but that Gatsby intends to take the blame. The next day, Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car. George, who has leapt to the conclusion that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle must have been her lover, finds Gatsby in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He then fatally shoots himself.

Nick stages a small funeral for Gatsby, ends his relationship with Jordan, and moves back to the Midwest to escape the disgust he feels for the people surrounding Gatsby’s life and for the emptiness and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast. Nick reflects that just as Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth. Though Gatsby’s power to transform his dreams into reality is what makes him “great,” Nick reflects that the era of dreaming—both Gatsby’s dream and the American dream—is over.

Picture: The cast of "The Great Gatsby" (2013)

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Director: Jack Clayton

Notable Actors:
-Robert Redford
-Mia Farrow
-Sam Waterston

The first film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece involved a lot of big Hollywood names, including Robert Redford, who starred as the title character, and Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote the screenplay soon after completing work on the first of The Godfather movies. Director Jack Clayton’s approach in adopting Fitzgerald’s novel involved staying true to the original story as well as depicting the Jazz Age culture of the 1920s with historical accuracy. Although contemporary critics praised the film for these attributes, as well as for Redford’s acting and Coppola’s writing, they also criticized the film for its lack of emotional resonance. As New York Times film critic Vincent Canby put it: “The sets and costumes and most of the performances are exceptionally good, but the movie itself is as lifeless as a body that's been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool.” Even so, the film remains useful to students of the novel for the way it brings to life an accurate vision of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age world.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (1974)

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Director: Baz Luhrmann

Notable Actors:
-Leonardo DiCaprio
-Carey Mulligan
-Tobey Maguire

Compared to Jack Clayton’s historically precise adaptation, Baz Luhrmann’s version of Fitzgerald’s novel seems wildly flamboyant. This is particularly the case with Luhrmann’s vibrant use of more contemporary music, which gives the film’s Jazz Age atmosphere a twenty-first century edge. Although Luhrmann mostly remained faithful to the source material, he introduced a couple of changes to Nick Carraway’s frame story. The film opens with Nick receiving treatment for alcoholism at a psychiatric hospital, where a doctor encourages him to commit his memoirs to paper. The film then concludes with Nick completing his book and titling it The Great Gatsby. As with Clayton’s adaptation, Luhrmann’s received mixed reviews from critics, who in large part felt that the film lacked substance despite its high production value and strong performances. Critic Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal put it thus: “it’s a spectacle in search of a soul.” In a contrasting view, one of Fitzgerald’s granddaughters reportedly praised the film for its strong sense of style, positing that Fitzgerald himself would have approved.

Picture: The Great Gatsby (2013)

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"Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."
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"But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound."

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(Gatsby) "-was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games."
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" It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: ‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired."

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"If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,’ said Gatsby. ‘You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock. . . .’ Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."

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" The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. "
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" ‘Who is this Gatsby anyhow?’ demanded Tom suddenly. ‘Some big bootlegger?’
‘Where’d you hear that?’ I inquired.
‘I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.’
‘Not Gatsby,’ I said shortly. "

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" Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge . . . the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand. So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. "

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" Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor. "
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" I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by. "

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"After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home. "
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"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning— "

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1. To show your understanding, re-write the following quote in your own words: Stories are a platform to contemplate scenarios of alternative realities and how humans act within them. They help us evaluate options and prepare decisions. In this way, they expand and improve our framing skills.
-"Stories give us an opportunity to see everything from different perspectives, which helps us make rational decisions and conclusions."

2. What do you think the author means by ‘framing skills/capabilities’?
-I believe the author refers to the skill of making up an opinion about people/things/places.

3. As we experience and manipulate alternative realities—evaluating the universe of counterfactuals that we mentally construct—we ponder options and perhaps improve our judgment. - Write about something in your book that has improved your judgement of real, unimagined situations.
-The ending of the novel, more specifically Gatsby's death, improved my judgement of real unimaganed situations. He was killed by George because Tom framed him for the death of Myrtle.

4. How are stories used in educational settings nowadays?
-Stories are often used in legal education.

5. What is “causal determinism”?
-"Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. "

6. How do stories help us to act as a counterbalance to “causal determinism”?
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7. How did JFK use stories to improve his strategy related to the Cuban missile crisis?
- In 1963, there were signs of a lessening of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. In his commencement address at American University, President Kennedy urged Americans to reexamine Cold War stereotypes and myths and called for a strategy of peace that would make the world safe for diversity. Two actions also signaled a warming in relations between the superpowers: the establishment of a teletype "Hotline" between the Kremlin and the White House and the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on July 25, 1963.
In short, JFK used stories to resist the temptation for one-track thinking.

8. According to cognitive scientists, notably Ruth Byrne at Trinity College Dublin, why are stories so helpful?
According to Ruth Byrne, stories are helpful because they remind us of options, broadening rather than deepening our focus.

9. Explain the 5 benefits of stories below, in your own words to show understanding:
-Strories give us  the idea that there is only one path to follow: (...)
-It makes us better thinkers: (...)
-We interact with them in ways that make them useful to apply:(...)
-That they tap into our implicit knowledge: (...)
-It gives people a sense of purpose: (...)

10. This extract came from a non fiction book called Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil. In a nutshell, explain why our ability, as humans, to tell and understand stories gives us an advantage over technology: