Development Unit: The Great Gatsby
How we understand experiences or ideas, and the stories we read, depends on the way we view them. Our perceptions, and the perceptions of the author or narrator who presents a story to us, strongly shape our sense of meaning. To what extent do we trust our own view, or the view of someone telling us a story? Are things we believe to be true merely illusions? In this unit, we will read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby and a series of related critical essays to explore the Central Question: How do perceptions, illusions, and dreams influence our lives? In considering the unit’s Central Question, we will examine what the novel seems to say thematically about perceptions and dreams—including the American Dream and the desire to recapture the past. We will also examine Fitzgerald’s use of a first-person narrator to tell the story, and whether his perceptions of Gatsby’s world are reliable or unreliable. To demonstrate our understanding of the novel and of Fitzgeralds’s craft, we will write a literary analysis that takes a critical position and defends it, using evidence from the novel and other texts from the unit.