IB ENG SL YR 1 - EXAM COMMENTS - GATSBY - FOR THE ORAL COMMENTARY

Here are some basic comments that you could make on the Gatsby extract in the exam.   There are about 13 different literary terms used in my notes of this passage. You should aim to refer to as many as possible in your commentary.

TEXT	COMMENT NOTES
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferry boat across the Sound.	Like Joyce in Dubliners, Fitzgerald uses twilight – evening moving on into night symbolically. There is something ghost like about the ferry boat – that if it symbolises anything symbolises society, the normal and everyday world that Gatsby is no longer part of. The boat perhaps is life departing. The growing darkness is perhaps symbolic of the loss and hopelessness of the world.
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.	The moon – a traditional symbol of femininity and romance here contributes to the ghost like image introduced in the last sentence but present throughout the whole novel.  The verb ‘melt’ is being used metaphorically
" Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to  the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment         man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.	A reference to loss. The loss of the natural world and the loss of paradise.   What is the dream that Fitzgerald is referring to here? I think it’s a dream of living a perfect life. A right life. He uses three pre-modifiers to prepare us for the noun ‘dream’. This sets up expectation and hope in the reader of something grand and magnificent. This is emphasised by the use of the superlative ‘greatest’.   The verb ‘enchanted’ reminds us of the magical and dream like references scattered through the novel. Perhaps drawing on fairy tale.   Fitzgerald uses the noun ‘man’ here referring to the human race. What America meant for the world is the hope of a new Eden – paradise on earth, a second chance at getting the world right.   A strong use of alliteration is used perhaps to create a feeling of pleasure – this linked to polysyllabic lexis
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.	A link declarative sentence. It brings Nick’s abstract contemplation of the first Dutch sailors who landed on this coast and compares them to Gatsby. It contrasts their wonder to Gatsby’s love for Daisy. There is something magnificent about their discovery and – what seems to me - trivial and banal about Gatsby’s desire. This banality is picked up with the alliterative ‘Daisy’, ‘dock.’ Daisy is a common pretty not very distinguished flower. There is the  colour symbolism of the ‘green light’
He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”	In these  two sentences of the novel Fitzgerald describes Gatsby’s hope and the certainty of achieving it. And the second sentence is a statement of defeat and failure. It is dominated by a sense of loss. This is partly achieved by the vague locations – adverbials - of ‘somewhere’, ‘ vast obscurity’ and ‘dark fields’ – note the assonance of ‘vast’ and ‘dark’. The use of pre-modifiers to the noun ‘city.’ The alliterative ‘republic’ and ‘rolled’. The lexis ‘dark’ and ‘night’ reinforce the sense of loss and negativity.