Novel Study, Part 1: How to Read a Novel, and Meeting the Narrator of The Great Gatsby

Hook: the party next door

Imagine moving into a small rented house next to a mansion. Every weekend hundreds of strangers arrive in cars, there's an orchestra on the lawn, and nobody seems to know who the host is. Some guests say he killed a man. Others say he was a spy. And late one night you see him alone at the edge of the water, stretching his arms toward a tiny green light across the bay.

That is how F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) begins. It is short for a novel, about 180 pages, but it rewards slow, careful reading. In this lesson you learn how to study a novel, and you start this one.

Why study a whole novel?

A novel gives a writer room that a short story doesn't: several developed characters, subplots, change over time and patterns (symbols, images) that build across hundreds of pages. Studying one teaches you to hold many threads in your mind at once and to notice how they connect.

We use The Great Gatsby because it is often taught in Grade 11, it is short enough to read in three weeks, and it is in the public domain in Canada (Fitzgerald died in 1940), so you can read it free online. The same method works for any novel your teacher or you choose.

Step 1: before reading, get the context

• The author: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 to 1940), an American writer from St. Paul, Minnesota. He became famous young with his first novel (1920) and lived the glamorous, expensive life he wrote about.
• The period: the novel is set in the summer of 1922. The First World War has ended. The U.S. economy is booming. Prohibition (1920 to 1933) has made alcohol illegal, so huge fortunes are being made by bootleggers who sell it illegally. Fitzgerald himself named this time the Jazz Age.
• The setting: two fictional villages on Long Island, near New York City: East Egg, home of old, inherited money, and West Egg, home of the newly rich. Between Long Island and the city lies a grey, dusty industrial area Fitzgerald calls the valley of ashes.
• Content note: the novel includes heavy drinking, an affair, violence including a fatal car accident and a shooting, and a character who expresses racist views. The novel presents these critically; we discuss them in Lesson 10.

Step 2: plan the reading

• A schedule. Divide the novel into sections with a goal for each. For Gatsby's nine chapters, three chapters a week works well.
• A reading log. One entry per chapter: a 3-line summary, one quotation with page number, and one question. Add a line for anything that repeats (a colour, an image, a phrase).
• A character map. Start it after Chapter 1 and update it as relationships change.
• A theme tracker. Pick two or three big ideas (wealth, the past, honesty) and note the page every time one appears. By the end you'll have evidence ready for an essay.

Step 3: notice the text features

Before Chapter 1, look at the novel's text features:

• The title. The Great Gatsby. Great in what sense: impressive? famous? or said with irony, the way a circus announces The Great Houdini? Keep the question open as you read.
• The epigraph. The novel opens with a short poem:

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!"

It is credited to Thomas Parke D'Invilliers, a poet Fitzgerald invented for his first novel. The epigraph suggests the plot: a man who performs, with gold and showy effort, to win a woman.

• Chapter structure. Nine numbered chapters with no chapter titles, so you must decide what each is about. Chapter breaks often jump in time; note where each one starts and ends.

Step 4: read the opening and meet the narrator

The novel is told by Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest who moves East in 1922 to learn the bond business. He rents a small house in West Egg next to Gatsby's mansion. His cousin Daisy lives across the bay in East Egg with her husband, Tom Buchanan, whom Nick knew at university.

The first sentences:

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."

Nick then tells us he is inclined to reserve all judgments, and that Gatsby represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn, and yet that there was something gorgeous about him.

Kind of narration: Nick is a first-person participant-observer: he takes part, but Gatsby is the main subject. And he is telling the story retrospectively, after it is all over. He already knows how it ends, and he hints at it.

Important ideas in Chapters 1 to 3

• Chapter 1: Nick dines with Tom and Daisy. Tom is wealthy, physically powerful and aggressive in his views; he praises a book claiming that the "white race" is in danger. Daisy is charming but unhappy; of her baby daughter she says, I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. Nick learns Tom has a mistress. That night, Nick sees Gatsby on his lawn, stretching his arms toward a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.
• Chapter 2: On the way to New York, Tom takes Nick through the valley of ashes, where a huge faded billboard shows the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, an eye doctor. Tom's mistress, Myrtle Wilson, is married to George Wilson, who owns a garage there. At a drunken party in the city apartment Tom keeps for Myrtle, he breaks her nose when she says Daisy's name.
• Chapter 3: Nick attends one of Gatsby's enormous parties, where guests repeat wild rumours about their host. Nick finally meets Gatsby, who has one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it. Nick also meets Jordan Baker, Daisy's friend, a professional golfer who, he learns, once cheated in a tournament. Nick ends the chapter calling himself one of the few honest people that I have ever known.