GCE A Level English Literature
Polonius: What do you read my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words
Welcome to A-level English Literature. This is a course leading to AS
after one year and A2 after a second. We will be following the English
Literature syllabus offered by the OCR exam board.
The study of English Literature at A-Level is all about reading and
responding to words. You will be given the opportunity to read and
write about a wide range of books, by authors from Shakespeare to the
present day. The course will allow you to develop your own opinions on
the texts and you will be encouraged to analyse your views closely.
A-Level is very different from GCSE. Reading and comprehending a text
with some analysis is one thing but reading across texts, comparing and
contrasting, is another! Close, critical analysis has to be developed, both
of the literature itself and its context.
The course is demanding, as you will be studying several texts,
simultaneously. Consequently, work needs careful planning.
You will be required to maintain a folder, in which to keep your notes,
which must be organised and well maintained.
You need to buy a copy of the texts, from the school, as soon as
possible, so that you can make notes in them to help you as you go
along and with revision.
The opportunities for studying and appreciating literature are vast, and
you should try to read more than the set texts. Get hold of other titles
by the same authors. Discover the author’s biographical details, what
was happening socially, politically and economically at the time and
keep your eyes peeled for theatre productions in addition to those run
by school.
(Our expectations of you, in a God-like voice)
1. Thou shalt like reading.
2. Thou shalt attend all lessons (and if you know you are going
to miss one you should contact the member of staff).
3. Thou shalt turn up to lessons on time.
4. Thou shalt prepare before a lesson (that doesn’t mean putting
your make-up on! You will need to have done the reading;
written the essays or completed the research).
5. Thou shalt contribute to lessons (no mutes please).
6. Thou shalt bring the correct equipment
(texts, pens, pencils, paper).
7. Thou shalt not insult your teacher with lame
excuses or poor work (be organised).
8. Thou shalt meet deadlines.
9. Thou shalt produce all work yourself (no plagiarism).
10. Thou shalt live, eat and breathe English Literature!
Lessons
At AS level you will have 8 hours of lesson time a fortnight with two different
teachers. These lessons will often require you to read and prepare material,
in advance, an essential component to success. If you fail to complete
preparatory work, you will not be able to take part in the lesson!
Absence
You are expected to attend every lesson. If you are absent, it is your
responsibility to find out what you missed and then to catch up. If you know
in advance about an absence, you should contact a member of staff. Don’t
make appointments during lessons unless it is absolutely essential.
Homework
With exams at the end of year of years 12 and 13, along with two pieces of
coursework and various essays and assignments throughout, you will feel
under pressure at certain times. However, it is up to you to plan your time
effectively. Write deadlines in your diary, with reminders in the weeks before
and speak to us if you don’t understand what you need to do or if you are
struggling. Nothing annoys a teacher more than turning up on the day an
assignment is due not having done it.
And…
In addition to homework and class work activities, you should be reading on
a regular basis. If you do not like reading, then English Literature is probably
not the wisest of choices at A-Level!
But…
Don’t expect us to do the work for you!!
AS Examination
AS Unit F661: Poetry & Prose 1800 – 1945 (60% of AS)
Closed book 2 hours
Section A: Poetry
Section B: Prose
Candidates answer 1 question on 1
Candidates answer 1 question from a
poem (but bring in wider reading
choice of 2
from the rest of the selection).
AS Unit F662: Literature post – 1900 (40% of AS)
Task 1: Close reading – Duffy (15 Task 2: Essay on linked texts –
marks) Close critical analysis of 1
‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Death of
poem (about 40 lines). 1,000 words.
a Salesman’ (25 marks) Essay on
contrasts and comparisons across two
texts. 2,000 words.
A2 Examination
A2 Unit F663: Drama & Poetry pre – 1800 (30% of A-Level)
Closed book
Section A: Shakespeare
Section B: Drama & Poetry preEssay on a Shakespeare play,
1800
demonstrating relevant knowledge
Candidates write a comparative essay
and understanding of the text,
of one drama and one poetry text.
structure and form and others’
Answer 1 question from a choice of 5.
interpretations of the play. Answer 1
question from a choice of 2.
A2 Unit F664: Texts in time (20% of A-Level)
Candidates submit an extended, individual essay of a maximum of 3,000
words. The essay must examine and compare 3 texts.
AO
1
2
3
4
Description
Communication & Presentation
Articulate creative, informed and relevant responses to literary texts,
using appropriate terminology and coherent, accurate written
expression.
Demonstrate Knowledge & Understanding
Demonstrate detailed critical understanding in analysing the ways in
which structure, form and language shape meanings in literary texts.
Analysis and Evaluation
Explore connections and comparisons between literary texts, informed
by interpretations of other readers.
Demonstrate Knowledge & Understanding
Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the
contexts in which literary texts are written and understood.
Unit
F661: Poetry & prose 1800 –
1945 exam
F662: Literature post 1900 c/wk
F663: Drama & Poetry pre 1800
exam
F664: Texts in time c/wk
AO1
% of Whole A-Level
AO2
AO3
AO4
5
12.5
5
7.5
TOTAL
%
30
5
5
5
7.5
5
10
5
7.5
20
30
3.75
18.75
3.75
28.75
6.25
26.25
6.25
26.25
20
100%
There will be internal deadlines for pieces of homework and class work. This page
outlines the main coursework deadlines that must be adhered to.
AS Deadlines
September 2013
Be sure you have read The Great Gatsby over the summer holiday and have
completed all three tasks outlined at the end of this pack.
They are to be submitted to your English teacher/s during your first English lesson.
November 2013
Monday 11th November – First Draft of Duffy Coursework handed in.
Monday 18th November – To have read Death of a Salesman.
December 2013
Wednesday 11th December - Final Duffy Coursework handed in
January 2014
Monday 6h January – To have read the set text/prose.
February 2014
Monday 24th February – First Draft of The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman
coursework to be handed in
March 2014
Monday 24th March – Final Draft of The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman
coursework handed in.
These dates are non-negotiable! We are giving you this information now so that you
can begin to balance your work-load. If you are struggling, at any stage discuss the
situation with your teacher.
In small groups you will be given one of the following extracts to look at. After you
have read them, ask yourself the following questions and be prepared to feedback to
the rest of the class:
a. What happens in the extract? Where and when is it set? How do you know this?
b. Who is the narrator? What do you think of him/her? How do they feel about the
characters they describe? How do you know this? Consider the language used?
c. What characters are we introduced to? What do you think of them? Why do you
think like that?
d. What literary techniques have been used in your extract? What effect do they
have?
e. What do you think will happen next in the novel?
Extract 1
On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the
morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was
travelling through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for
an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely
spattered with bird shit. “He was always dreaming about trees,” Placida Linero, his
mother, told me twenty seven years later, recalling the details of that unpleasant
Monday. “The week before, he’d dreamed he was alone in a tinfoil airplane and flying
through the almond trees without bumping into anything,” she told me. She had a
well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people’s dreams, provided
they were told to her before eating, but she hadn’t noticed any ominous augury in
those two dreams of her son’s, or in the other dreams of trees he’d told her about on
the mornings preceding his death.
Nor did Santiago Nasar recognise the omen. He had slept little and poorly, without
getting undressed, and he woke up with a headache and a sediment of copper stirrup
on his palate, and he interpreted them as the natural havoc of the wedding revels that
had gone on until after midnight. Furthermore: all the many people he ran into after
leaving his house at five minutes past six until he was carved up like a pig an hour
later remembered him as being a little sleepy but in a good mood, and he remarked
to all of them in a casual way that it was a very beautiful day. No one was certain if
he was referring to the state of the weather. Many people coincided in recalling that it
was a radiant morning with a sea breeze coming in through the banana groves, as
was to be expected in a fine February of that period. But most agreed that the
weather was funereal, with a cloudy, low sky and the thick smell of still waters, and
that at the moment of the misfortune a thin drizzle like the one Santiago Nasar had
seen in his dream grove was falling. I was recovering from the wedding revels in the
apostolic lap of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, and I only awakened with the clamour of
the alarm bells, thinking they had turned them loose in honour of the bishop.
Extract 2
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral
arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly
insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly
primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty cool idea.
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living
on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for
this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small
pieces of green paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small pieces of
green paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were
miserable, even the ones with the digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming
down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a
bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed
to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl
sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realised what it was that
had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be
made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one
would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible
stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
Extract 3
When she was home from her boarding school I used to see her almost every day
sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and
her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course
I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the
window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see
her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then
when I knew her name with M. I saw her several times outside too. I stood right
behind her once in a queue at the public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t
look once at me, but I watched the back of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It
was very pale, silky, like burnet cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her
waist, sometimes in front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only
once, before she came to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her with it
loose, and it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.
Another time one Saturday off when I went up to the Natural History Museum I came
back on the same train. She sat three seats down and sideways to me, and read a
book, so I could watch her for thirty-five minutes. Seeing her always made me feel
like I was catching a rarity, going up to it very carefully heart-in-mouth as they say. A
Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance. I always thought of her like that, I mean words like
elusive and sporadic, and very refined – not like the other ones, even the pretty ones.
More for the real connoisseur.
The year she was still at school I didn’t know who she was, only how her father was
Doctor Grey and some talk I overheard once at a Bug Section meeting about how her
mother drank. I heard her mother speak once in a shop, she had a la-di-da voice and
you could see she was the type to drink, too much make-up, etcetera.
Well, then there was the bit in the local paper about the scholarship she’d won and
how clever she was, and her name as beautiful as herself, Miranda. So I knew she
was up in London studying art. It really made a difference, that newspaper article. It
seemed like we became more intimate, although of course we still did not know each
other in the ordinary way.
Extract 4
An Introduction to the Work, or Bill of Fare to the Feast.
An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or
eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary [Public House], at
which all persons are welcome for their money. In the former case, it is well known,
that the entertainer provides what fare he pleases; and tho’ this should be very
indifferent, and utterly disagreeable to the taste of his company, they must not find
any fault; nay, on the contrary, good-breeding forces them outwardly to approve and
to commend whatever is set before them. Now the contrary of this happens to the
master of an ordinary. Men who pay for what they eat, will insist upon gratifying their
palates, however nice and even whimsical these may prove; and if every thing is not
agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse and to damn their
dinner without control.
To prevent therefore giving offence to their customers by any such disappointment, it
hath been usual, with the honest and well-meaning host, to provide a bill of fare,
which all persons may peruse at their first entrance into the house; and, having
thence acquainted themselves with the entertainment which they may expect, may
either stay and regale with what is provided for them, or may depart to some other
ordinary better accommodated to their taste.
As we do not disdain to borrow wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of
lending us either, we have condescended to take a hint from these honest victuallers,
and shall prefix not only a general bill of fare to our whole entertainment, but shall
likewise give the reader particular bills to every course which is to be served up in this
and the ensuing volumes.
Extract 5
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve
been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the
people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a
reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In
consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many
curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The
abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a
normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a
politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the
confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a
hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation
was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least
the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious
suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid
of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I
snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at
birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a
limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a
certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last
autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention
forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human
heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my
reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something
gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were
related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand
miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability
which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”— it was an
extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any
other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out
all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of
his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is widely considered to be F. Scott Fitzergerald's
greatest novel. It is also considered a seminal work on the fallibility of the American
dream. It focuses on a young man, Jay Gatsby, who, after falling in love with a
woman from the social elite, makes a lot of money in an effort to win her love. She
marries a man from her own social strata and he dies disillusioned with the concept of
a self-made man. Fitzgerald seems to argue that the possibility of social mobility in
America is an illusion, and that the social hierarchies of the "New World" are just as
rigid as those of Europe.
The novel is also famous as a description of the "Jazz Age," a phrase which Fitzgerald
himself coined. After the shock of moving from a policy of isolationism to involvement
in World War I, America prospered in what are termed the "Roaring Twenties." The
Eighteenth Amendment to the American Constitution, passed in 1919, prohibited the
sale and consumption of alcohol in America. "Prohibition" made millionaires out of
bootleggers like Gatsby and owners of underground salons, called "speakeasies."
Fitzgerald glamorizes the noveau riche of this period to a certain extent in his Jazz
Age novel. He describes their beautiful clothing and lavish parties with great attention
to detail and wonderful use of color. However, the author was uncomfortable with the
excesses of the period, and his novel sounds many warning notes against excessive
love of money and material success.
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was not a great success during his lifetime, but became
a smash hit after his death, especially after World War II. It has since become a
staple of the canon of American literature, and is taught at many high schools and
universities across the country and the world. Four films, an opera, and a play have
been made from the text.
Although The Great Gatsby is generally considered to be a work focused on the
American Dream and is analyzed as such, it has connections to other literary work of
its period. The Great Gatsby's publication in 1925 put it at the forefront of literary
work by a group which began to be called the Lost Generation. The group was socalled because of the existential questioning that began to occur in American
literature for the first time after the war. Many critics argue that this Generation
marked the first mature body of literature to come from the United States.
The Lost Generation more specifically was a group of writers and artists who lived and
worked in Paris or in other parts of Europe during World War I and the Depression.
This group included authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra
Pound, and T.S. Eliot. This group often had social connections with one another, and
would even meet to critique one another's work.
Aside from the loss of innocence caused by the first World War, the group, for the
most part, shared the stylistic bond of literary modernism. Influenced by turn-of-thecentury decadent poets and aestheticism (which proclaims the doctrine of "art for
art's sake"), the modernist movement was a move away from realism. Instead,
characters' subjective experiences were portrayed through stream-of-consciousness
techniques, symbolism, or disjointed time frames. The Great Gatsby is an early
exemplar of the modernist techniques of the Lost Generation, illustrating a type of
jumbled symbolism in the first image of Gatsby and in the description of the "valley of
ashes."
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman stems from both Arthur Miller's personal
experiences and the theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. The
play recalls the traditions of Yiddish theater that focus on family as the crucial
element, reducing most plot to the confines of the nuclear family. Death of a
Salesman focuses on two sons who are estranged from their father, paralleling one of
Miller's other major works, All My Sons, which premiered two years before Death of a
Salesman.
Although the play premiered in 1949, Miller began writing Death of a Salesman at the
age of seventeen when he was working for his father's company. In short story form,
it treated an aging salesman unable to sell anything. He is berated by company
bosses and must borrow subway change from the young narrator. The end of the
manuscript contains a postscript, noting that the salesman on which the story is based
had thrown himself under a subway train.
Arthur Miller reworked the play in 1947 upon a meeting with his uncle, Manny
Newman. Miller's uncle, a salesman, was a competitor at all times and even competed
with his sons, Buddy and Abby. Miller described the Newman household as one in
which one could not lose hope, and based the Loman household and structure on his
uncle and cousins. There are numerous parallels between Abby and Buddy Newman
and their fictional counterparts, Happy and Biff Loman: Buddy, like Biff, was a
renowned high school athlete who ended up flunking out. Miller's relationship to his
cousins parallels that of the Lomans to their neighbor, Bernard.
While constructing the play, Miller was intent on creating continuous action that could
span different time periods smoothly. The major innovation of the play was the fluid
continuity between its segments. Flashbacks do not occur separate from the action
but rather as an integral part of it. The play moves between fifteen years back and
the present, and from Brooklyn to Boston without any interruptions in the plot.
Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway in 1949, starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy
Loman and directed by Elia Kazan (who would later inform on Arthur Miller in front of
the House Un-American Activities Committee). The play was a resounding success,
winning the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the Tony Award for Best Play. The New Yorker
called the play a mixture of "compassion, imagination, and hard technical competence
not often found in our theater." Since then, the play has been revived numerous times
on Broadway and reinterpreted in stage and television versions. As an archetypal
character representing the failed American dream, Willy Loman has been interpreted
by diverse actors such as Fredric March (the 1951 film version), Dustin Hoffman (the
1984 Broadway revival and television movie), and, in a Tony Award-winning revival,
Brian Dennehy.
While The Great Gatsby is a highly specific portrait of American society during the
Roaring Twenties, its story is also one that has been told hundreds of times, and is
perhaps as old as America itself: a man claws his way from rags to riches, only to find
that his wealth cannot afford him the privileges enjoyed by those born into the upper
class. The central character is Jay Gatsby, a wealthy New Yorker of indeterminate
occupation. Gatsby is primarily known for the lavish parties he throws each weekend
at his ostentatious Gothic mansion in West Egg. He is suspected of being involved in
illegal bootlegging and other underworld activities.
The narrator, Nick Carraway, is Gatsby's neighbor in West Egg. Nick is a young man
from a prominent Midwestern family. Educated at Yale, he has come to New York to
enter the bond business. In some sense, the novel is Nick's memoir, his unique view
of the events of the summer of 1922; as such, his impressions and observations
necessarily color the narrative as a whole. For the most part, he plays only a
peripheral role in the events of the novel; he prefers to remain a passive observer.
Upon arriving in New York, Nick visits his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband,
Tom. The Buchanans live in the posh Long Island district of East Egg; Nick, like
Gatsby, resides in nearby West Egg, a less fashionable area looked down upon by
those who live in East Egg. West Egg is home to the nouveau riche, people who lack
established social connections, and who tend to vulgarly flaunt their wealth. Like Nick,
Tom Buchanan graduated from Yale, and comes from a privileged Midwestern family.
Tom is a former football player, a brutal bully obsessed with the preservation of class
boundaries. Daisy, by contrast, is an almost ghostlike young woman who affects an
air of sophisticated boredom. At the Buchanans's, Nick meets Jordan Baker, a
beautiful young woman with a cold, cynical manner. The two later become
romantically involved.
Jordan tells Nick that Tom has been having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, a woman
who lives in the valley of ashes, an industrial wasteland outside of New York City.
After visiting Tom and Daisy, Nick goes home to West Egg; there, he sees Gatsby
gazing at a mysterious green light across the bay. Gatsby stretches his arms out
toward the light, as though to catch and hold it.
Tom Buchanan takes Nick into New York, and on the way they stop at the garage
owned by George Wilson. Wilson is the husband of Myrtle, with whom Tom has been
having an affair. Tom tells Myrtle to join them later in the city. Nearby, on an
enormous billboard, a pair of bespectacled blue eyes stares down at the barren
landscape. These eyes once served as an advertisement; now, they brood over all
that occurs in the valley of ashes.
In the city, Tom takes Nick and Myrtle to the apartment in Morningside Heights at
which he maintains his affair. There, they have a lurid party with Myrtle's sister,
Catherine, and an abrasive couple named McKee. They gossip about Gatsby;
Catherine says that he is somehow related to Kaiser Wilhelm, the much-despised ruler
of Germany during World War I. The more she drinks, the more aggressive Myrtle
becomes; she begins taunting Tom about Daisy, and he reacts by breaking her nose.
The party, unsurprisingly, comes to an abrupt end.
Nick Carraway attends a party at Gatsby's mansion, where he runs into Jordan Baker.
At the party, few of the attendees know Gatsby; even fewer were formally invited.
Before the party, Nick himself had never met Gatsby: he is a strikingly handsome,
slightly dandified young man who affects an English accent. Gatsby asks to speak to
Jordan Baker alone; after talking with Gatsby for quite a long time, she tells Nick that
she has learned some remarkable news. She cannot yet share it with him, however.
Some time later, Gatsby visits Nick's home and invites him to lunch. At this point in
the novel, Gatsby's origins are unclear. He claims to come from a wealthy San
Francisco family, and says that he was educated at Oxford after serving in the Great
War (during which he received a number of decorations). At lunch, Gatsby introduces
Nick to his business associate, Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfhsheim is a notorious criminal;
many believe that he is responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series.
Gatsby mysteriously avoids the Buchanans. Later, Jordan Baker explains the reason
for Gatsby's anxiety: he had been in love with Daisy Buchanan when they met in
Louisville before the war. Jordan subtly intimates that he is still in love with her, and
she with him.
Gatsby asks Nick to arrange a meeting between himself and Daisy. Gatsby has
meticulously planned their meeting: he gives Daisy a carefully rehearsed tour of his
mansion, and is desperate to exhibit his wealth and possessions. Gatsby is wooden
and mannered during this initial meeting; his dearest dreams have been of this
moment, and so the actual reunion is bound to disappoint. Despite this, the love
between Gatsby and Daisy is revived, and the two begin an affair.
Eventually, Nick learns the true story of Gatsby's past. He was born James Gatz in
North Dakota, but had his name legally changed at the age of seventeen. The gold
baron Dan Cody served as Gatsby's mentor until his death. Though Gatsby inherited
nothing of Cody's fortune, it was from him that Gatsby was first introduced to world of
wealth, power, and privilege.
While out horseback riding, Tom Buchanan happens upon Gatsby's mansion. There he
meets both Nick and Gatsby, to whom he takes an immediate dislike. To Tom, Gatsby
is part of the "new rich," and thus poses a danger to the old order that Tom holds
dear. Despite this, he accompanies Daisy to Gatsby's next party; there, he is
exceedingly rude and condescending toward Gatsby. Nick realizes that Gatsby wants
Daisy to renounce her husband and her marriage; in this way, they can recover the
years they have lost since they first parted. Gatsby's great flaw is that his great love
of Daisy is a kind of worship, and that he fails to see her flaws. He believes that he
can undo the past, and forgets that Daisy's essentially small-minded and cowardly
nature was what initially caused their separation.
After his reunion with Daisy, Gatsby ceases to throw his elaborate parties. The only
reason he threw such parties was the chance that Daisy (or someone who knew her)
might attend. Daisy invites Gatsby, Nick and Jordan to lunch at her house. In an
attempt to make Tom jealous, and to exact revenge for his affair, Daisy is highly
indiscreet about her relationship with Gatsby. She even tells Gatsby that she loves him
while Tom is in earshot.
Although Tom is himself having an affair, he is furious at the thought that his wife
could be unfaithful to him. He forces the group to drive into the city: there, in a suite
at the Plaza Hotel, Tom and Gatsby have a bitter confrontation. Tom denounces
Gatsby for his low birth, and reveals to Daisy that Gatsby's fortune has been made
through illegal activities. Daisy's real allegiance is to Tom: when Gatsby begs her to
say that she does not love her husband, she refuses him. Tom permits Gatsby to drive
Daisy back to East Egg; in this way, he displays his contempt for Gatsby, as well as
his faith in his wife's complete subjection.
On the trip back to East Egg, Gatsby allows Daisy to drive in order to calm her ragged
nerves. Passing Wilson's garage, Daisy swerves to avoid another car and ends up
hitting Myrtle; she is killed instantly. Nick advises Gatsby to leave town until the
situation calms. Gatsby, however, refuses to leave: he remains in order to ensure that
Daisy is safe. George Wilson, driven nearly mad by the death of his wife, is desperate
to find her killer. Tom Buchanan tells him that Gatsby was the driver of the fatal car.
Wilson, who has decided that the driver of the car must also have been Myrtle's lover,
shoots Gatsby before committing suicide himself.
After the murder, the Buchanans leave town to distance themselves from the violence
for which they are responsible. Nick is left to organize Gatsby's funeral, but finds that
few people cared for Gatsby. Only Meyer Wolfsheim shows a modicum of grief, and
few people attend the funeral. Nick seeks out Gatsby's father, Henry Gatz, and brings
him to New York for the funeral. From Henry, Nick learns the full scope of Gatsby's
visions of greatness and his dreams of self-improvement.
Thoroughly disgusted with life in New York, Nick decides to return to the Midwest.
Before his departure, Nick sees Tom Buchanan once more. Tom tries to elicit Nick's
sympathy; he believes that all of his actions were thoroughly justified, and he wants
Nick to agree.
Nick muses that Gatsby, alone among the people of his acquaintance, strove to
transform his dreams into reality; it is this that makes him "great." Nick also believes,
however, that the time for such grand aspirations is over: greed and dishonesty have
irrevocably corrupted both the American Dream and the dreams of individual
Americans.
Jay Gatsby (James Gatz)
Gatsby is, of course, both the novel's title character and its protagonist. Gatsby is a
mysterious, fantastically wealthy young man. Every Saturday, his garish Gothic
mansion in West Egg serves as the site of extravagant parties. Later in the novel, we
learn that his real name is James Gatz; he was born in North Dakota to an
impoverished farming family. While serving in the Army in World War I, Gatsby met
Daisy Fay (now Daisy Buchanan) and fell passionately in love with her. He worked
briefly for a millionaire, and became acquainted with the people and customs of high
society. This, coupled with his love of Daisy, inspired Gatsby to devote his life to the
acquisition of wealth.
Nick Carraway
The novel's narrator, Nick Carraway comes from a well-to-do Minnesota family. He
travels to New York to learn the bond business; there, he becomes involved with both
Gatsby and the Buchanans. Though he is honest, responsible, and fair-minded, Nick
does share some of the flaws of the East Egg milieu. However, of all the novel's
characters, he is the only one to recognize Gatsby's "greatness," revealing himself as
a young man of unusual sensitivity.
Daisy Buchanan
Daisy is Nick's cousin, Tom's wife, and the woman that Gatsby loves. She had
promised to wait for Jay Gatsby until the end of the war, but after meeting Tom
Buchanan and comparing his extreme wealth to Gatsby's poverty, she broke her
promise. Daisy uses her frailty as an excuse for her extreme immaturity.
Tom Buchanan
A brutal, hulking man, Tom Buchanan is a former Yale football player who, like Daisy,
comes from an immensely wealthy Midwestern family. His racism and sexism are
symptomatic of his deep insecurity about his elevated social position. Tom is a vicious
bully, physically menacing both his wife and his mistress. He is a thoroughgoing
hypocrite as well: though he condemns his wife for her infidelity, he has no qualms
about carrying on an affair himself.
Jordan Baker
Daisy's longtime friend, Jordan Baker is a professional golfer who cheated in order to
win her first tournament. Jordan is extremely cynical, with a masculine, icy demeanor
that Nick initially finds compelling. The two become briefly involved, but Jordan
rejects him on the grounds that he is as corrupt and decadent as she is.
Myrtle Wilson
An earthy, vital, and voluptuous woman, Myrtle is desperate to improve her life. She
shares a loveless marriage with George Wilson, a man who runs a shabby garage. She
has been having a long-term affair with Tom Buchanan, and is very jealous of his
wife, Daisy. After a fight with her husband, she runs out into the street and is hit and
killed by Gatsby's car.
George B. Wilson
George is a listless, impoverished man whose only passion is his love for his wife,
Myrtle. He is devastated by Myrtle's affair with Tom. After her death, the magnitude
of his grief drives Wilson to murder Jay Gatsby before committing suicide himself.
Henry Gatz
Gatsby's father; his son's help is the only thing that saves him from poverty. Gatz tells
Nick about his son's extravagant plans and dreams of self-improvement.
Meyer Wolfsheim
A notorious underworld figure, Wolfsheim is a business associate of Gatsby. He is
deeply involved in organized crime, and even claims credit for fixing the 1919 World
Series. His character, like Fitzgerald's view of the Roaring Twenties as a whole, is a
curious mix of barbarism and refinement (his cuff links are made from human
molars). After Gatsby's murder, however, Wolfsheim is one of the only people to
express his grief or condolences; in contrast, the socially superior Buchanans fail to
attend Gatsby's funeral.
Dan Cody
Dan is a somewhat coarse man who became immensely wealthy during the Gold
Rush. He mentored Gatsby when he was a young man and gave him a taste of elite
society. Though he left Gatsby a sum of money after his death, it was later seized by
his ex-wife.
Michaelis
Wilson's neighbor; he attempts to console Wilson after Myrtle's death.
Catherine
Myrtle Wilson's sister. Tom, Myrtle, and Nick visit her and her neighbors, the McKees,
in New York City.
The McKees
Catherine's neighbors. The couple is shallow and gossipy and concern themselves only
with status and fashion.
Ewing Klipspringer
A shiftless freeloader who almost lives at Gatsby's mansion. Though he takes
advantage of Gatsby's wealth and generosity, Klipspringer fails to attend his funeral.
Owl Eyes
An eccentric, bespectacled man whom Nick meets at one of Gatsby's parties. He is
one of the few people to attend Gatsby's funeral.
HAVISHAM
MEAN TIME (1998)
Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then
I haven’t wished him dead. Prayed for it
so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes,
ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.
Spinster. I stink and remember. Whole days
in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall; the dress
yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe;
the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this
to me? Puce curses that are sounds not words.
Some nights better, the lost body over me,
my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear
then down till I suddenly bite awake. Love’s
hate behind a white veil; a red balloon bursting
in my face. Bang. I stabbed at a wedding-cake.
Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.
Don’t think it’s only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.
Copyright Carol Ann Duffy, 1993
Task 1.
Context
For your comparative coursework piece you will be reading two texts: The Great
Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. To meet the
assessment criteria you will need to show an understanding of the contexts in which
these two texts are set.
Read the contextual backdrops (attached plus your own research) of both The Great
Gatsby and Death of a Salesman attached here. Complete a similarities and
differences comparison grid, aiming for a side of A4, for the context of these texts
(social, historical, political and cultural background).
Task 2.
The Great Gatsby
You also need to have read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Write a brief summary of what happens in each chapter, aiming for two sides of A4.
You should also complete a character mind-map for all the characters and include at
least one key quote for each, aiming for a side of A4.
You can use the information included in this pack, as well as your independent
research.
Task 3.
Duffy
You will also be studying “The World’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy. You need to
research the following famous mythological, Biblical and historical characters, and
make notes on them, aiming for two sides of A4.
Charles Darwin
Medusa
Faustus
The Kray Twins
King Midas
Eurydice
Lazarus
Sigmund Freud
Tiresias
Demeter
Salome