了不起的盖茨比chapter4

IV. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993), pp.39-52

A. Representative Passages

1. “He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with the resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American-that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and,even more,with the formless grace of our nervous,sporadic games.”(41)

2. “but if I had thought of it at all.I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened,the end of some inevitable chain.It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people-with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”(47)

3. \"A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement:There are only the pursued,the pursing,the busy and the tired.\"(51)

B. Setting

1. Time:“one morning late in July”(41);“one October in 1917”(48)

2. Location:on the way to having lunch;“in a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar”(44);“at the Plaza Hotel”(48)

C. Main Characters

1. Gatsby:show off; like \"simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door\"(41) ; \"a turbaned character\"(43)

2. Daisy Fay：\"the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville\"

3. Jordan Baker

4. Mr Wolfsheim:“a small,flat-nosed Jew large head”(44);\"two fine growth of hair;half-darkness tiny eyes\"(45)

D. Episodes

1. Nick wrote down on the empty spaces of a timetable the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer.

2. Mr Gatsby invited Nick to have lunch with him and he thought they would ride up together.

3. Mr Gatsby asked Nick what his opinion of him.

4. Gatsby told him something about his life and Nick believed him.

5. They met a man called Mr Wolfsheim and he spoke highly of Gatsby.

6. Nick came across Tom at the restaurant but Gatsby suddently disappeared.

7. Jordan Baker told me something about Daisy's past and I knew Gatsby once was Daisy's lover.

8. Jordan asked Nick to invite Daisy to his house so that Gatsby could see her.

E. Imagery

1. Some one described Gatsby as \"second cousin to the devil\"(39)

2. Gatsby's car:\"a sort of green leather conservatory\"(41)

3. White dress and roadster:“She dressed in white,and had a little white roadster.”(48)

Here white represents emptiness

4. golden shoulder:“I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder”(51)

5. Prosperous New York and a funeral:“with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish cut of non-olfactory money.”“a dead man passed us in a hearse”(44) strong contrast.