The Great Gatsby

Grade Levels

Excerpt

Multiple Choice. 4 pts each

I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town.

• If you were going to explicate this paragraph, what would be the most powerful word in relationship to the novel’s themes? a. Conservatory, b. Monstrous, c. Suns, d. Rich
• What is the symbolism of “many layers of glass”? a. It represents the automobile production style of the 1920s, b. It represents Gatsby’s separation from reality, c. It represents Gatsby’s excessive money, d. It represents Nick’s position of being on the outside

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in manycolored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher— shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

• What effect do the shirts have on Daisy? a. They cause sadness, b. They cause anger, c. They cause regret, d. They cause love
• 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.”
• What is the contradiction in Nick’s father’s advice? a. To choose to reserve judgment is to make a judgment., b. To call himself vulnerable is a judgment in itself., c. He wants Nick to treat people equally but still criticize them.
• At what moment does Nick abandon his father’s advice? a. When Tom hits Myrtle, b. When Jordan lies at the golf tournament, c. When Gatsby loses his dream of Daisy, d. When Nick meets Gatsby’s father

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.

• Why does Fitzgerald place the billboard in the valley and not in New York City? a. New York symbolizes money, but the valley is the negative effect of it, b. That is where the doctor used to have his practice, c. The valley symbolizes the large money earned by someone like a doctor

About

A final assessment for "The Great Gatsby", focusing on passage analysis, thematic analysis, and context analysis. The test uses both objective and subjective questions.