The Great Gatsby: Chapters 8-9

1. “If that was true he must of felt that he has lost the whole warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream”

This quote relates to Gatsby’s entire life and the theme of the novel. Gatsby had built an impressive life around his only dream which was to get Daisy to fall in love with him. Gatsby, however, never got his girl and paid the ultimate price of death for involving himself with her. The novel is titled “The Great Gatsby” yet, Gatsby is the most pathetic character in the whole novel.  Not only does he waste his life of a girl who is playing him, but his riches and entire life is pretty much built upon lies. At his funeral, only two people cared about him. All of his possessions and riches went to waste. Gatsby never got the love that he had been dreaming about for so long. Children, the moral if the story is... "money doesn’t buy you happiness." :)

2. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

This part of the book is flashing back to when it talks about Gatsby always looking at the green light on the end of Daisy’s dock, then it mean that he should go after her, now he looks at it in shame of what he did. It used to represent that he needed to get the Daisy as fast as he could and now that he knows he can't have her he needs to look into the "orgastic future" instead of the past which he failed to do.  He focuses on the struggle of human beings to achieve their goals by re-creating the past. Yet humans prove themselves unable to move beyond the past and they cannot escape it as they continue to struggle to transform their dreams into reality. They expend all of their energy in pursuit of a goal that moves ever farther away which proves Gatsby’s struggle throughout the book.

3.  “She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby-nothing. He felt married to her, that’s all.”

Gatsby wasted his life on his dream girl later finding out that she would just leave him out in the dust and stay with Tom.  Daisy desired money while Gatsby desired love.  He said that "he felt married to her, that was all" because when people are married there is not usually a "spark" anymore.  They say they love each other but all they do is sit around all day just trying to keep minimal happiness and a roof over their head.  Also Gatsby feels like he was married to her because he spend his life being obsessed with her.

4. " You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

 This is the most important quote of the novel which Nick says to Gatsby. This means that he think that Gatsby is more honest of a person than Daisy, Tom, and Myrtle put together. This is ironic because the title of the novel is “The Great Gatsby” and Nick is the only person who thinks he ended up turning out that way in the end.  To everyone else he was no hero at all.  This also shows how Nick really is a judgmental character, which he is portrayed throughout the novel to be a middle man who sees everyone equally.

5.  "He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free."

Nick can't help but feel the heavy bearings of Gatsby, and Nick can’t go up to Gatsby and tell him the truth. Gatsby holds on to Nick for emotional support as his world has taken a complete 360 for the worse. The reason for this complete change of character in Gatsby is when Daisy rejects him. Gatsby has dedicated his reality and changed everything about him to fulfill Daisy his entire life revolved around her and now it’s all gone. The irony of the title is revealed as the "Great" Gatsby kills himself in hopeless despair. He kills himself because Daisy chooses to be with Tom who is obviously just cheating on her, which is so sad… Gatsby looses the girl of his dreams to a guy that is cheating on her.  Dang.

2.3 Best In Class

Is naming a valedictorian still a good idea? Are high school academics becoming too competitive?  In this essay the author argues that a valedictorian should not be chosen because the students are too competitive.  Naming a valedictorian is important, though it may cause distress and anguish for other students you have to be able to deal with it.  If someone is getting beat out and winning the spot by a thousandths of a point the highest scoring student should be recognized.  Obviously they did something better, and should get credit for it.  How would you feel if you were number one in your class and the top twenty students were rewarded with “the top spot”?

High school is here to help prepare you for the real world and if you can’t accept the fact that someone beat you for the top spot in your class you will not be able to deal with more important life traumas.  If they rid of the valedictorian spot it is as if they are babying the kids that didn’t get the top spot like it’s okay for everyone to receive the same achievements.  But it’s not.  Grow up and accept the fact that you weren’t number one.  Every point on every paper you did in high school is valuable, and you just have to learn from your mistakes. People should be humble enough to let the person with the highest grade be recognized.

High school is not the end of the world; it’s just the first step you take into becoming an adult.  Just because you didn’t get the highest GPA in your class doesn’t mean that you won’t get into a good college or anything like that.  When you grow up you will not be defined as a person by your GPA in high school.  It’s sad that students are so insolent that they can’t even let someone do better than them.  The fact of the matter is that they need to learn that they won’t always be the best at everything.  When you go out into the real world there will be people that are better at you in many different aspects in life.

Another reason for having a valedictorian position is that it keeps students motivated.  Of course students that care about their grades will always try their best but others may not.  Some students need a motivation to push them through high school.  If there is no top spot, competing to have a high GPA wouldn’t be necessary in most cases, so lots of high school students would slack because it doesn’t matter.  If they are in to top five percent they know that they will all be recognized either way so there’s no point.  Most students do as little as they can to skim by, and not having a valedictorian stop will increase the slacking of the students.

No matter what they do there will be competition between the students that care about their future.  If you don’t get the top spot you just chillax, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just the start for a bright future.  Don’t get hung up on being number one, just do your best.  Keeping the valedictorian spot is important for schools to have.  Like in the words of the Beetles just, “LET IT BE”.

  

The Great Gatsby: Chapters 6-7

"By God...women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish."
   
 In this dialogue, Tom is discussing his true feelings about Gatsby to Nick. He is surprised that his wife knows him. This quote shows that he is very stubborn and hypocritical because Tom runs around with poor people who drink all day (especially his mistress), while he criticizes his wife for knowing a man that is all too friendly in his taste. His remark about fishes reflects upon the quote, "There are many fishes in the sea," saying that loose women meet odd single men that are single for a good explanation. Tom tries to convince Nick these horrible things about his wife to make himself feel better that she has connections with someone as powerful, handsome, and popular as himself.

"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."

We learn that Gatsby's real name is James Gatz. He changed it after the start of his career at age seventeen when he helped a man named Dan Cody with his yacht. Gatsby had a rough life in the beginning. He was a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher, and did anything that got him food and a bed. Cody's luxurious yacht represented all the beauty and glamour of the world to Gatsby. Gatsby let Cody buy him clothes, and eventually the traveled to the West Indies and the Barbary Coast together. The point of this quote is to show that Gatsby was willing to do anything to be in the rich community, instead of the suffering, poor community.


“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself”.

            Gatsby envisions himself as a young person, living their lifestyle, and walking their walk. Fitzgerald points out that this youthful being is Gatsby’s “Platonic conception of himself,” so he believes that he actually is youthful and plays on this disposition throughout the novel. For example, when he sees Daisy for the first time, close to the beginning of the novel, he turns into this dumbstruck teenager, who is not able to control himself. In reality, we all have this outlook on ourselves, we picture ourselves as smart or athletic or funny, and when we don’t meet up with these expectations, we fall off the pedestal.

"I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom, a gray, florid man with a hard, empty face — the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon."

The portrait is of Dan Cody. Gatsby has it hanging in his room because that is how much he influenced his life. Even though all Carraway sees is a harsh and dreadful looking old man, Gatsby sees someone who helped him through his career and life. Because of Cody, Gatsby never became an alcoholic. When Gatsby saw how alcohol affected his life, he never got into the idea of getting sloppy, and drunk. Gatsby also inherited money from Cody. $25,000 that he never got, yet he did get an education from this experience.


"I wouldn't ask too much of her...you can't repeat the past."

Nick is telling this to Gatsby to inform him that Daisy is not the same person she was when they first met. In the past, nothing could have separated them besides that fact that he had little money. Therefore, after he left for the army she remarried Tom for social status reasons. Now that Gatsby is rich, he is trying to go back to the past and change how Daisy feels about him. Daisy is not happy with being married to Tom, but she will not leave him because she is content with her social status. Gatsby is convinced that he can relive the most exciting era in his life,  but Nick assures him that he cannot.

Week 2.1 Commencement Speech

In this speech the author is arguing that no one in the world should try to be perfect because it is unachievable for any human being.  The only perfect thing out there is God.  She thinks that it is too large of a load to carry trying to be the best of the best at everything.  Most teenagers and some adults never had the epiphany that there is no way to be perfect…ever. 

When you try to be perfect at something because you’re trying to impress someone else you completely lose yourself in the process.  People need to strive for their best, and come to the understanding that it won’t be perfect.  How does society deal with that?  For most people it is hard. Seeing many famous beautiful people out there, you ask yourself why you can’t be as pretty or as good of a singer as them.  But you never fail to see the paparazzi get a snapshot of them picking their nose out in public, or something embarrassing.  You should realize that heck they obviously aren’t perfect.  Looks can be deceiving and just because you think you or others look perfect there are many different people with different images of what they believe perfect is.  Someone’s ideal husband might be a long bearded scruffy looking guy and on the contrary others might want the clean shaved business type.  Also if someone might look perfect on the outside they might not be on the inside.              

Once you find someone that you love no matter what flaws you have they will love you for who you are.  Instead of striving to look like the most attractive supermodel, you should strive to be the best you can be.  Be yourself.  If we spend too much energy trying to be like others we lose ourselves in the process.  After college the author realized that it was a lot easier trying to be yourself without caring what other people thought about you.  She felt more at ease and stress free with almost everything she did.   Being your own individual makes you unique and beautiful.  God wants us to be just the way he created us to be, that is why we all look different from each other.  There is not one person in the world that is identical to the other which is beauty in itself.  We weren’t made to be like others.  There is no need to hide who we are with masks of fake identities.   

Not only are we hiding ourselves from being negatively judged by others but from our self as well.  It would benefit you more if you were yourself, but first you have to find yourself.  Don’t chase others dreams because they image what you believe perfection looks like.  It is never too late to start finding yourself, so take off the mask you’ve been hiding behind and show everyone who you really are.   Be the person that doesn’t care about other’s opinions but rather the person that does what they want because it makes them feel good.