Topics for final exam

The Great Gatsby by F.S.Fitzegerald The Great Gatsby is a story about the impossibility of recapturing the past and also the difficulty of altering one’s future. The protagonist of the novel is Jay Gatsby, who is the mysterious and wealthy neighbor of the narrator, Nick Carraway. Although we know little about Gatsby at first, we know from Nick’s introduction—and from the book’s title—that Gatsby’s story will be the focus of the novel. As the novel progresses and Nick becomes increasingly drawn into Gatsby’s complicated world, we learn what Gatsby wants: Daisy, Nick’s cousin, the girl he once loved. Anything and anyone that stands between Gatsby and Daisy becomes an antagonist. Although Daisy’s brutish husband Tom is the most obvious antagonist, a variety of more abstract concepts—such as class difference, societal expectations, and Gatsby’s past lies—can also be considered antagonists. The most powerful antagonist is time itself, which prevents Gatsby from recapturing what he lost. After a brief passage which frames the narrative as Nick’s recollections of a summer from his past, the narrative is for the most part linear, beginning with Nick’s move to New York, which makes him Gatsby’s neighbor. Gatsby is wealthy, with a mysterious past that is the subject of much speculation. After meeting his neighbor at a party, Nick learns that despite Gatsby’s success, he longs only for Daisy. Gatsby’s central aim through the novel is to see Daisy again and recaptured their shared past. On a trip to the city with Tom, Nick meets Tom’s mistress, Myrtle. In the rising action of the novel, Nick arranges a reunion between Gatsby and Daisy, and Jordan tells Nick about Daisy and Gatsby’s history. Gatsby and Daisy fall back in love, and Gatsby tells Nick one version of his life story. Many of the stories Gatsby tells about himself turn out to be lies or half-truths. The fantastic nature of his stories gives Gatsby’s history a mythical quality, which reinforces the sense of him as a tragic hero. Gatsby and Daisy are briefly happy together, and Nick gets drawn into their romance, even though the outlook for the couple’s future seems hopeless, largely because of Gatsby’s inability to separate his dreams from reality. Both the reader and Nick can see the disparity between Gatsby’s idealized image of the Daisy he knew five years earlier, and the actual character of Daisy herself. Fitzgerald presents Daisy as a shallow, materialistic character, reinforcing the sense that Gatsby is chasing a dream, rather than a real person: “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams… it had gone beyond her, beyond everything.” On an outing into the city, Gatsby erupts and tells everyone in the room that he and Daisy are in love and are going to run away together to marry. However, Tom says Daisy will never leave him, and Daisy is unable to tell Tom she never loved him. Here, for the first time, Gatsby must confront directly the possibility that his dream cannot be attained, and see Daisy as she currently is, rather than his idealized remembrance of her. Even at this point, however, he remains convinced she will ultimately choose him over Tom.

The climax of the novel comes when the group is driving back from New York in two cars, and Myrtle, Tom’s lover, mistakes Gatsby’s car for Tom’s and runs out into the street and is hit and killed. The car that kills Myrtle belongs to Gatsby, but Daisy is driving. After this, the action resolves quickly. Gatsby takes the blame in order to protect Daisy, and Myrtle’s husband, George, kills Gatsby (and then himself) as revenge. Gatsby has already died a symbolic death at this point, when he realizes that Daisy will not call him and is not going to run away with him after all. His dream is at last obliterated, and he heads into the morning of his death facing reality for the first time. Nick describes the world as Gatsby now sees it as unbearably ugly: “he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.” In contrast to the previous obsession with the past, the final passages of Gatsby’s life are concerned with newness, creation, and the future – one which, lacking his dream of Daisy, he finds hideous.
In the final falling action the book, Nick must also confront reality, as he realizes his glamorous, enigmatic neighbor was the poor son of farmers who got mixed up in criminal activities and had no true friends besides Nick. Nick tries to arrange a funeral for Gatsby, but none of the guests from his lavish parties come. Daisy and Tom leave town, and Nick is left alone with Gatsby’s father, who reveals the truth of his son’s humble beginnings as “James Gatz.” After the funeral Nick decides to return to the Midwest, where he is from, feeling disgusted by the “distortions” of the East. First, though, he visits Gatsby’s house one last time, boarded up and already defaced with graffiti, and reflects on the power of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock that kindled Gatsby hope of recapturing the past up until the moment of his death. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” he says, including himself in the tragedy of Gatsby’s fall.

15. 
    The Poetry of Harlem Renaissance: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, “I, too”, “If We Must Die”, “Harlem” "The Negro Speaks of River" was written in 1920 by the American poet Langston Hughes. One of the key poems of a literary movement called the "Harlem Renaissance," "The Negro Speaks of River" traces black history from the beginning of human civilization to the present, encompassing both triumphs (like the construction of the Egyptian pyramids) and horrors (like American slavery). The poem argues that the black "soul" has incorporated all of this historical experience, and in the process has become "deep." The poem thus suggests that black cultural identity is continuous, that it stretches across the violence and displacement of slavery to connect with the past—and that black people have made vital, yet often neglected contributions to human civilization. “I, Too” is a cry of protest against American racism. Its speaker, a black man, laments the way that he is excluded from American society—even though he is a key part of it. But, the speaker argues, black people have persevered—and will persevere—through the injustices of racism and segregation by developing a vibrant, beautiful, and independent cultural tradition, a cultural tradition so powerful that it will eventually compel white society to recognize black contributions to American life and history.
    

Throughout the poem, the speaker insists that he is authentically American and that his community has made important contributions to American life. The speaker begins by announcing, “I, too, sing America.” This is an allusion to a poem by Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing.” In that poem, Whitman describes America as a song, which emerges from a diverse chorus of workers, farmers and industrial labors, women and men.
However, Whitman notably does not include black people in his vision of American life. Even though the poem was written in 1855, just five years before the Civil War started, he doesn’t mention slavery at all. The speaker objects to Whitman’s poem, insisting that black people contribute to the American “song”: in other words, that black culture and black labor have been key to creating America.
The poem argues that these contributions have been consciously erased by white people. In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker notes that he is forced to “eat in the kitchen / when company comes.” This is an extended metaphor for segregation. It describes the way that white people treat black people and black contributions to American culture.
The speaker also suggests that white and black communities are quite intimate with each other. The speaker is “the darker brother”—in other words, he’s part of the same family—the American family—as the white people who force him to eat in the kitchen. Despite this intimacy, however, the white members of this metaphorical family force him out of view when other people are around, when they have “company.” In other words, the extended metaphor highlights the hypocrisy of white communities: even though white and black people are part of the same American family, white people exclude, neglect, and ignore black contributions to American history and culture.
Despite being treated like a second-class citizen, the speaker responds to injustice by declaring that he will “laugh,” “eat well,” and “grow strong.” In other words, black people respond to racism and segregation by developing vibrant and independent cultural traditions. These traditions give them strength so that, in the future, white people will no longer be able to ignore their contributions to American culture—“they’ll see how beautiful I am,” the speaker announces in line 16. Further, as a result of this strength and beauty, white people will no longer be able to exclude the “darker brother” from the table. Segregation itself will break down.
The poem thus argues that racism involves a willful refusal to acknowledge that black people as just as American as anyone else. And it argues that this refusal will eventually cause the collapse of racism. The poem encourages black people to persevere, to deepen and extend their contributions to American life and culture until those contributions are impossible to ignore.

16.