Gatsby Character Paragraph

Unit 3 Benchmark Assignment

Gatsby Character Paragraph

Assignment:​ Re-read the end of Chapter III below. As you read, ​highlight​ passages that show Nick’s character. After you have read the passage, ​write one paragraph that analyzes how Fitzgerald develops the character of Nick in this section

(that means you can only use text from this section of the novel - no chapter 1 pieces).

How does Nick ​change/grow​ in this chapter alone? The prompt and outline are available again at the bottom of the passage.

Passage:

“Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that the events of

three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely

casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than

my personal affairs.

Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried

down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and

young bond-salesmen by their first names and lunched with them in dark crowded restaurants

on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who

lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing

mean looks in my direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.

I took dinner usually at the Yale Club--for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my

day--and then I went upstairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a

conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around but they never came into the

library so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was mellow I strolled down

Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel and over Thirty-third Street to the Pennsylvania

Station. I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction

that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to

walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few

minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.

Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets,

and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At

the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in

others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a

solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of

night and life.

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs,

bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as

they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes

Unit 3 Benchmark Assignment

outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and

sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.

For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. At first I was

flattered to go places with her because she was a golf champion and every one knew her name.

Then it was something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The

bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something--most affectations conceal

something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning--and one day I found what it was.

When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain

with the top down, and then lied about it--and suddenly I remembered the story about her that

had eluded me that night at Daisy's. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly

reached the newspapers--a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the

semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A caddy

retracted his statement and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken.

The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw that this was because she

felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was

incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this

unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order

to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard

jaunty body. It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame

deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a

curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some

workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man's coat.

"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful or you oughtn't to

drive at all."

"I am careful."

"No, you're not."

"Well, other people are," she said lightly.

"What's that got to do with it?"

"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an

accident."

"Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself."

"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why

I like you."

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations,

and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act

Unit 3 Benchmark Assignment

as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle

back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them: "Love, Nick," and all I could

think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared

on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken

off before I was free.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of

the few honest people that I have ever known.”

Prompt:​ ​How does Nick change/grow?

Be certain not to summarize the plot or offer a mere character description. See outline to

help place your paragraph together.

Outline of your paragraph:

Topic Sentence – the purpose of your paragraph (no I statements)

Claim – What was Nick like at the beginning of the passage?

Evidence – Support your Claim

Reason – why this is important to the novel? What makes him be this way?

Claim – What is Nick like at the end of the passage?

Evidence – support your claim of his change?

Reason – Why is this so important? How did he change?

Concluding Sentence – Was this a positive or negative change for the story as a whole?

You will also be held accountable for your variety of sentences and ellipse

usage in your writing. Be sure to include and highlight the following:

- ​3 different types of sentences​ (simple, compound, and complex) and highlight each type in yellow

- ​1 ellipse in your citations​ and highlight pink