The Great Gatsby

Grade Levels

Excerpt

I. Name the characters that are described below. [First and last names, please.]

• “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.”
• “By half-past two he was in West Egg, where he asked someone the way to Gatsby’s house.”
• “He seemed reluctant to put away the picture, held it for another minute, lingeringly, before my eyes. The he returned the wallet and pulled from his pocket a ragged old copy of a book called Hopalong Cassidy.”
• “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life . . . .”
• “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 . . . .”
•  “She began to ask . . . Questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”
• “[He] was fifty years old then, a product of Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five.”
• “She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can.”
• “I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.”
• “I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.”
• “Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward.”
• “She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby--nothing.”
• “His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it.
• “He was a blond, spiritless man, anemic, and faintly handsome.”
• “The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.”

II. Name the speakers of these passages. [First and last names, please.]

• “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead . . . . After that my own rule is to let everything alone.”
• “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can.”
• “They’re a rotten crowd . . . You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
•  “I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”
•  “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”
• “I’m thirty . . . I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”

About

Features many passages from the novel for character identification, plus some T/F. To do well, students must have read the entire novel closely.