instal the new version for android The Great Gatsby

(One of my high-school teachers read Roots aloud to us for 45 minutes each class period-we made it through all 888 pages.) Stymied by the structure and language of Gatsby, I couldn’t get a handle on the characters either. Like my students, I hadn’t been prepared by my public education for such a text. Fitzgerald’s coupling of lyrical passages with a minimalist plot, full of fits and starts, proved too great a challenge for me.

I, too, had struggled with Gatsby when I first read the book-and I had been a junior in college. More advanced readings, I realized, would have to be tabled. Eventually, one brave soul would raise a hand.

“Surely,” I’d say with as much enthusiasm as possible, “you think this part is funny!” And I’d launch into a reading of Nick Carraway’s opening narration: “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.” Silence. Any appeal I made to the sheer pleasures of the text fell flat. The teenagers in my classroom-all children of color living in an impoverished rural community in South Florida, many of them first-generation Americans whose parents had come from Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, or Guatemala-simply did not understand a majority of the words on the page. I succeeded, only to be deflated: My students fought Gatsby from the beginning.

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Instal the new version for android The Great Gatsby