The Great Gatsby, Journal #1

1.      Chapter 1, Pages 1-21

2.      In this first chapter, we meet the narrator, Nick Carraway, who recently moved to West Egg in New York. During this chapter, he visits Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s house for dinner and meets a young woman named Jordan Baker. While they are eating dinner, Carraway mentions that he lives in West Egg and the Buchanan’s ask him if he knows a man by the name of Gatsby. But before he could answer, they were on to a new topic. At the end of the chapter, Nick is sitting on a grass roller on his front lawn when he sees Gatsby off in the distance.

3.      In the first chapter, the character Tom Buchanan appears in the novel.

a.       “Now [Buchanan] was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward…It was a body capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.”

b.      From this character description, we can see that he is sturdy, arrogant, dominant, aggressive, rich and almost cruel. Moreover, through his actions and words, he is rude and racist.

c.       In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan is an arrogant rich man who is married to Daisy Buchanan, Nick Carraway’s second cousin. Buchanan hosts a dinner with Nick where we find that Buchanan is a racist and has “some woman” in New York. He also allows a young woman by the name of Jordan Baker to stay with him and Daisy at their mansion.

4.      “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool--that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

a.       Here Daisy Buchanan is trying to explain how in their culture of the 1920’s, intelligence is not a desired trait in a woman. Men would rather have a woman that is foolish or ditzy than a woman who is smart. Since she is smart, Daisy is challenging their society and saying that the only way a woman can be successful is by being a fool or an air-head. Even though she is intelligent, she conforms to society by pretending to be an air-head.