Ch 5-6 Gatsby Close Reading Activity

Directions: ​You will examine all four of these passages below. You will need to
reread the passages from chapter five and chapter six and then fill in the chart with
details from the passage. Upload this document to Google Classroom when you are
finished.

Chapter 5

1. “​He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his
house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved
eyes.Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as
though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once
he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs. His bedroom was the simplest room of all
except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy
took the brush with delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down
and shaded his eyes and began to laugh” (Fitzgerald 91).

General Summary: Literary Devices/Word

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How this relates to the entire How does this advance our
chapter: understanding of: plot, theme,
setting, characters, or
symbolism…
 2. ​“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.” Daisy put her arm
through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he has just said. 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
neat 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” (Fitzgerald 92-93).

General Summary: Literary Devices/Word

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chapter: understanding of: plot, theme,
setting, characters, or
symbolism…

Chapter 6

3. ​“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were
shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them
as his parents at all. 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” (Fitzgerald 98).

General Summary: Literary Devices/Word

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chapter: understanding of: plot, theme,
setting, characters, or
symbolism…

4.​ “There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same
profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an
unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before. Or
perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete
in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it
had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s
eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have
expended your own powers of adjustment” (Fitzgerald 104).

General Summary: Literary Devices/Word

Choices/Style I noticed...
How this relates to the entire How does this advance our
chapter: understanding of: plot, theme,
setting, characters, or
symbolism…