Small group discussion
Large group discussion

Yesterday you finished the book (chapters 8 and 9) and wrote one intriguing quote and one textually-based question for each of the two final chapters (so a total of two questions and two interesting quotes).

First 15-20 mins...small group discussion
Form groups of three...
Start by discussing chapter 8...First share and explain to your partners why you chose your quote.  Provide the page and paragraph and quote, provide a little context regarding what is happening at that point in the novel, and then explain why this quote grabbed your attention. Ask your partners if they have any thoughts about the quote or what you said about the quote. When the three of you are done discussing that quote, have the next person share theirs and discuss.

Repeat the process for your chapter 8 discussion questions...locate the quote, provide context re what is happening in the novel, and then share your question, remembering not to answer your own question until your partners have had a chance to respond.

Repeat the process for chapter 9 quotes and questions.

Last 30 mins...Whole class discussion

HW: Tomorrow you will begin writing a Great Gatsby personal reflection paper.  In this 1st person paper you will explore some issue in your life by comparing it to issues and ideas explored in The Great Gatsby.  You should also incorporate connections from a variety of other sources: literature/music, news/current events, observations of, or discussions with, friends, family and acquaintances.   

Tonight, brainstorm possible ideas for a personal reflection paper.  You want your paper to be interesting, engaging, to pass the "So what?" test...so, be courageous, identify the edges in your life, the sources of inner conflict, questions, excitement, anxiety, joy, confusion - and which the novel (either directly or indirectly) touches upon.  Fill up two sides of a  page with brainstorming ideas.

Student and professional examples of personal reflection papers (and some notes about making connections):

Knowledge of the novel: Citations should not be just dropped into your paper but should be explained and discussed, shared and integrated into your sentences. You need to demonstrate your knowledge of the novel….you should reference what happens and you should make reference to characters and their feelings/beliefs/behaviors. You should have at 3-4 citations from the novel in your paper.  Be sure that their relevance to your point is clear.

Connections outside of the novel:  This is a personal reflection containing your unique personal insights or connections.  Your text should reflect that.  Include a total of combination of touches that make this a paper that only you would write.  Use at least two of the following techniques: personal anecdotes; quotes from conversations/communications with friends, families, acquaintances; allusions/references to literature, music, film; allusions to current events/news.

Student Example

Evaporating

One of my most distinct childhood memories is the scent of arugula. My backyard in Denver was this vast expanse of territory, full of different terrains and trenches and rock formations. There was the pine forest to the right of the house, the desert behind it with a birch oasis in the center, and the rugged gravel pits just beyond. No matter where I stood in this small world, I could always smell the arugula from our garden. I undoubtedly had some of the best and most carefree days of my life in that backyard. Simply being a kid is the most envious state, and a setting such as this only furthered my delight. But why are these memories so fleeting and distant? Why does my backyard seem so much smaller in pictures than it ever did in person, and why do I feel overwhelmingly sad whenever I smell arugula?

Time, I have concluded, tends to distort perception. I found this thought to be true while reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald as well. While the aroma of a common garden vegetable does not come close to his trials, I’d like to think Fitzgerald experienced similar feelings of nostalgia during his life—from his failed marriage to the one that got away—that prompted a novel deeply rooted and intent on recreating the past, in attempts to vocalize his own shortcomings and his inherent want to somehow fix them.

Jay Gatsby mirrors this want as the poster­child for nostalgia. He attempts continuously throughout his last five years to “recover something, some idea of himself perhaps… if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was” (110). Gatsby’s feelings toward his time with Daisy drive him to “recover” this former version of himself. He has the pleasant memories but the emotions associated with them are the exact opposite. He feels taunted by the past rather than content with what has happened, just as I get a hollow ache when thinking about my time in Colorado. And I loved it, just as Gatsby loved Daisy. But time warps these feelings into regret and wistfulness, challenging former emotions and entangling them beyond recognition.

Similarly, I often find myself thinking about former friendships. I’ve definitely had my fair share of these relationships end. Sometimes there’s a specific reason, but more often, and in turn more painfully, they just fade without reason. I’ll pass someone in the hall and suddenly find myself pouring over details from years ago and wondering why it’s impossible to even make eye contact.

My best friend from third to eighth grade, Marie, is the worst instance of this. Gatsby’s array of newspaper clippings and photographs of Daisy (93) could never compare to the multitude of pictures of Marie and me. From all the photographic evidence, it would appear that we were physically attached to one another throughout the course of our friendship. In all my yearbook photos, she sits in a desk beside me. In all my birthday pictures, she is sitting next to me as I open presents, identical radiant smiles plastered across our faces.

In moments like these I can understand why Gatsby kept clippings in Daisy’s absence. Even though it’s arguably more painful to look at them than to forget, there is always an internal hope that time will correct itself, that it will make up for itself, or reverse completely. Nick Carraway puts it best after Gatsby’s initial encounter with Daisy: “I think we all believed for a moment that [the old clock] had smashed in pieces on the floor” (87). Everyone, to some extent, falls victim to the passage of time. In my case it is Marie who brings this out, causing me to falter over memories.

However, where I’d like to think I diverge from Gatsby is the way I externally deal with these lapses in logical judgement. I’m simply content to wallow in regret and self­pity whereas Gatsby attempts to construct a meticulous empire to recreate his past. When Gatsby started going off the deep end, no dark humor intended, is when I began to feel a disconnect with his character. Although this disconnect is frustrating at times, it forces me to objectively consider Gatsby. It’s one thing to wistfully remember a better time in life but to fully submerge into the past is another. It’s obsessive, it’s unhealthy, and most of all impossible because time doesn’t forcefully rewind. It doesn’t simply stop, backtrack and repeat itself. It’s the most final of all restrictions, greater than anything else explored in Gatsby.

To illustrate this point, even if the extent is limited, people have control over their wealth and social status. Gatsby proved both of these with his self­built fortune and elaborate lifestyle. In this, Fitzgerald cleverly portrays that time is the one factor that we have absolutely no control over. I recognize Fitzgerald’s own pain in this realization.

Of course, this seems like such an obvious statement. Why wouldn’t time be final? How could it possibly be perceived otherwise? We all have broken­clock moments, unfortunately. Time has a way of disfiguring things while remaining shockingly consistent with itself. With repeated recitation I’ve begun to stomach this reality. I’ve considered its profound impact on the way I perceive my life: as I change, so do my reactions to recollections. And as a logical person who thrives on reasoning and patterns, the thought of giving up control to some intangible force scares me more than anything else.

I sense that it is the same innate fear that drives Gatsby to near insanity. It causes him to perpetually extend himself towards that green light, to act as though “the past [was] lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand” (110) as he tries to convince himself of Daisy’s solidarity. And until the end, “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” (180). Fitzgerald leaves me with this surprisingly personal and harsh statement regarding time. He tells me that we won’t stop, “boats against the current,” and will continue to yearn for something, anything, because the present will never suffice. Nostalgia is ever­present, a constant and singular reminder of the encompassing control of time. I find this a difficult concept to agree with, though.

So now I turn to music for reassurance and a second opinion, as usual, in these lyrics (translated from Portuguese) from Evaporar by Little Joy:

We've got as much time as we give it

Whatever happens

Whatever it takes

We give as much time as we have

It takes the things that happen

Whatever the things that happen cost

Only now I realize that what I got from the time I lost

Was learning how to give

And I still chase that time

I was able not to run from it

[I was able to] Find myself

Ah, it didn't move

Hummingbird in the air

The river stays there

The water that ran [into the sea] gets to the tides

[The river] becomes sea

It's as if dying was like debouching

Like spilling over the sky

Like a self­purification

Like leaving behind salts and minerals

Like evaporating.

It is in these broken­clock moments, I have ultimately concluded, that time distorts perception. It is in these moments when time simply hangs there like a “hummingbird in the air.” For Gatsby it’s when he thinks about Daisy. For me it’s when my mind races back to Denver with the tangy aroma of arugula and the pine and birch trees suddenly extend their limbs towards me. It’s when I can’t quite mimic the smiles on my face in pictures with Marie because the emotions are forever locked in the frame. Evaporar gives me closure that Gatsby failed to provide. It reveals that time does indeed control us, but it’s only when we concede to this fact that memories can fade. This voluntary surrender is what Gatsby failed in and why I felt so disconnected from him. I now know that eventually, unlike Gatsby, I will allow these memories to gradually dissipate and be replaced. I’ll leave them behind like salts and minerals; evaporating.

Professional Example Essay (with Hamlet)

Here is an example of a personal response to Hamlet written by Meghan O'Rourke for Slate Magazine. The link is provided here: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/grieving/features/2011/the_long_goodbye/hamlets_not_depressed_hes_grieving.html

The Long Goodbye: Hamlet’s Not Depressed, He’s Grieving

By Maghan O’Rourke

I had a hard time sleeping right after my mother died. The nights were long and had their share of what C.S. Lewis, in his memoir A Grief Observed, calls "mad, midnight … entreaties spoken into the empty air." One of the things I did was read. I read lots of books about death and loss. But one said more to me about grieving than any other: Hamlet. I'm not alone in this. A colleague recently told me that after his mother died he listened over and over to a tape recording he'd made of the Kenneth Branagh film version.

I had always thought of Hamlet's melancholy as existential. I saw his sense that "the world is out of joint" as vague and philosophical. He's a depressive, self-obsessed young man who can't stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But reading the play after my mother's death, I felt differently. Hamlet's moodiness and irascibility suddenly seemed deeply connected to the fact that his father has just died, and he doesn't know how to handle it. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the world, trying to figure out where the walls are while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed. I can relate. When Hamlet comes onstage he is greeted by his uncle with the worst question you can ask a grieving person: "How is it that the clouds still hang on you?" It reminded me of the friend who said, 14 days after my mother died, "Hope you're doing well." No wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey.

Hamlet is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. Grief, Shakespeare understands, is a social experience. It's not just that Hamlet is sad; it's that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. And Shakespeare doesn't flinch from that truth. He captures the way that people act as if sadness is bizarre when it is all too explainable. Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is "common." His uncle Claudius chides him to put aside his "unmanly grief." It's not just guilty people who act this way. Some are eager to get past the obvious rawness in your eyes or voice; why should they step into the flat shadows of your "sterile promontory"? Even if they wanted to, how could they? And this tension between your private sadness and the busy old world is a huge part of what I feel as I grieve—and felt most intensely in the first weeks of loss. Even if, as a friend helpfully pointed out, my mother wasn't murdered.

I am also moved by how much in Hamlet is about slippage—the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer. To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief—that to do so would be taboo somehow. Hamlet is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

Strangely, Hamlet somehow made me feel it was OK that I, too, had "lost all my mirth." My colleague put it better: "Hamlet is the grief-slacker's Bible, a knowing book that understands what you're going through and doesn't ask for much in return," he wrote to me. Maybe that's because the entire play is as drenched in grief as it is in blood. There is Ophelia's grief at Hamlet's angry withdrawal from her. There is Laertes' grief that …(Mr. Wesley deleted the spoiler part of the sentence). There is Gertrude and Claudius' grief, which is as fake as the flowers in a funeral home. Everyone is sad and messed up. If only the court had just let Hamlet feel bad about his dad, you start to feel, things in Denmark might not have disintegrated so quickly!

Hamlet also captures one of the aspects of grief I find it most difficult to speak about—the profound sense of ennui, the moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live. After my mother died, I felt that abruptly, amid the chaos that is daily life, I had arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Everything seemed exhausting. Nothing seemed important. C.S. Lewis has a great passage about the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or answer letters. At one point during that first month, I did not wash my hair for 10 days. Hamlet's soliloquy captures that numb exhaustion, and now I read it as a true expression of grief:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Those adjectives felt apt. And so, even, does the pained wish—in my case, thankfully fleeting—that one might melt away. Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicideality (or suicidal thinking and behaviors) than the depressed. For many, that risk is quite acute. For others of us, this passage captures how passive a form those thoughts can take. Hamlet is less searching for death actively than he is wishing powerfully for the pain just to go away. And it is, to be honest, strangely comforting to see my own worst thoughts mirrored back at me—perhaps because I do not feel likely to go as far into them as Hamlet does.

The way Hamlet speaks conveys his grief as much as what he says. He talks in run-on sentences to Ophelia. He slips between like things without distinguishing fully between them—"to die, to sleep" and "to sleep, perchance to dream." He resorts to puns because puns free him from the terrible logic of normalcy, which has nothing to do with grief and cannot fully admit its darkness.

And Hamlet's madness, too, makes new sense. He goes mad because madness is the only method that makes sense in a world tyrannized by false logic. If no one can tell whether he is mad, it is because he cannot tell either. Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes. No wonder Hamlet said, "… for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Grief can also make you feel, like Hamlet, strangely flat. Nor is it ennobling, as Hamlet drives home. It makes you at once vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive.

Like Hamlet, I, too, find it difficult to remember that my own "change in disposition" is connected to a distinct event. Most of the time, I just feel that I see the world more accurately than I used to. ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.") Pessimists, after all, are said to have a more realistic view of themselves in the world than optimists.

The other piece of writing I have been drawn to is a poem by George Herbert called "The Flower." It opens:

How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;

       To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

                   Grief melts away

                   Like snow in May,

       As if there were no such cold thing.

       Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart

Could have recover'd greennesse? It was gone

       Quite under ground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root, when they have blown;

                   Where they together

                   All the hard weather,

       Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

Quite underground, I keep house unknown: It does seem the right image of wintry grief. I look forward to the moment when I can say the first sentence of the second stanza and feel its wonder as my own.

Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture critic and an advisory editor. She was previously an editor at The New Yorker. The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her mother's death, is now out in paperback.