presentation: The Great Gatsby Chapter 6

Posted 2021-02-19 reshuffle

good morning.
Since we have been through the main idea, now i am going to talk about the aesthetics behind the story.

well Actually i am not sure if i have made a very suitable title, the word aesthetics literally means the philosophy of beauty . But i do want to share some of my personal feelings about beauty i just discovered during the reading. are you ready?

the question i am addressing today is:
what makes literature become literature?
that sound a little bit wield, but actually there are two meanings here.

·Why is the Great Gatsby classified as literature?
·How do that kind of literature embody beauty?

I am going to talk about three parts here.

Part one is about sentences.
some sentences are already familiar to us like this rhetorical language: her voice is full of money, and this epigram.

But i want to focus on poetry beauty here. Something like this poem we learned the day before yesterday.

Here is an example.

picture this, you and your confidante or your boyfriend are holding hands together and walking down the street, then you stop until you both step on a sidewalk full of moonlight and turn toward each other. Just at that moment, you hear the light singing gently. and then you both look up to the sky and see the sparkle of star.

The second part is about the main character.

when i am preparing for the presentation, it suddenly occured to me to compare G with other characters from other stories

the man sitting in the left, his name is F Underwood, the main character of the Netflix series . he is ambitious, cruel,manipulative, spares no efforts to climb to the most powerful throne.

but 1900 is just the opposite. he is a conservative, rather die in where he was born, devote himself to nothing other than piano jazz.

Here G seems to just stay right in the middle. He is aggressive but stubborn . he believes in nothing other than the green light as well as the illusion in his 17-year-old.

Despite their different personality and background, they do have one thing in common: they all have stories worth telling, their own stories. because these stories are more or less in line with our experience.

We reinforce our stereotype just like G believe in that love is long-lasting
we want to pursue our dream just like G want to chase the green light.

This is about emotion.

the third part is about sentimental beauty.
What exactly is sentimental beauty?
Here i have a small game for you to play.

I want all of you to stare at the stars in the sky, just like what young G did when he was 17 years old.

I know it is 9 clock in the morning, not a single star can be seen, so i have prepare something for you.

Surprise!

so i want all of you to focus on the stars in the picture, well i am very aware that i can’t force you to do so, you can just continue to enjoy your breakfast, that’s up to you, but, i suggest you to give it a shot tonight by looking at the stars outside your window before you go to bed.

I will give you ten second to concentrate and grasp what’s in your mind.

Now tell me, what‘s in your mind?

maybe a thought you have been thinking through for long,
Or maybe,an unforgettable epigram your father just told you when you were a child,
maybe a suggestion that you have no idea where it comes from,
Or maybe just a piece of fragment of your memory.

Now here is what in G’s mind.
And from then on, his life has been bound up with D’s.

And when we come back to our thought, whatever it is, it will never stay out of the trinity of past, present, and future. G’s are no exception, ours are not exception

If you are used to staring at the stars and thinking, then when you encounter this paragraph, it will suddenly occur to you that, that boy, who is going through sleepless nights one after another, with his eyes open counting the stars, is in fact, neither G nor the writer, but just an embodiment of ourselves

thank you.