Nick by Michael Farris Smith Reading Group Guide

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Nick by Michael Farris Smith Reading Group Guide 1) What were your expectations of Nick Carraway, coming to this book? How did he echo your impressions of him from THE GREAT GATSBY, and did he not conform? 2) Is the novel NICK a love story? 3) Ella is a survivor, a believer in possibility. Why do you think Nick is unable to agree to run away with her? Why does she then hide from him after suffering personal trauma? 4) The war depicted in NICK is both familiar and jarring, dehumanizing on its scale and yet oddly specific and personal. What do you believe Michael Farris Smith was trying to tell us about America’s involvement in World War I, and the young men who enlisted to fight there? Did they believe in what they were doing? 5) Nearly 100 years later, how does NICK’s vision of America compare with today? What parallels do you see between the 1920s and the 2020s? 6) What is it about America that makes Nick Carraway not wish to go home, or to spend time in a city or place other than New Orleans? 7) New Orleans is depicted both a startlingly dangerous and welcoming place, a city where criminal behavior defines almost every professional or personal relationship. What does Nick hope to get out of the city? What compels him to stay there? 8) Why is Nick drawn to Colette and Judah? Does his attraction to such extreme personalities lay the groundwork for what’s to come? 9) Further to the above question, what define’s Nick’s sense of morality, and how do his opinions here presage his attitude about Jay Gatsby and other criminals in THE GREAT GATSBY? 10) How does the Paris we see in NICK differ from the Paris as described by the Lost Generation, or for that matter, historically depicted in contemporary books, film or TV? .

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Chapter 1 - Summary
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The Great Gatsby Historical Context and Introduction
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Introduction to the Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 Novel The
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Historical Context: the Great Gatsby EXPLORING Novels, 2003
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Michael Farris Smith
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The Great Gatsby Character List
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Jordan Baker, Gender Dissent, and Homosexual Passing in the Great Gatsby
81 Jordan Baker, Gender Dissent, and Homosexual Passing in The Great Gatsby Maggie Gordon Froehlich Penn State Hazleton Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men . because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought im- possible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun deal- ing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body. --F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (63) Nearly every early twentieth-century American social bias is represented in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). We see such bias in nar- rator Nick Carraway’s ruminations on class and on women, in the rumors of criminality surrounding the newly rich Jay Gatsby, and, most explicitly, in the racism, classism, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant sentiment es- poused by Tom Buchanan, whose wealth, race, and gender position him as the voice of the dominant ideology. Tom’s reading of “The Rise of the Colored Empire” by “that man Goddard” (17) is, of course, a reference to Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, a popular work of scientific racism published just five years before Gatsby.1 Largely following Walter Benn Michaels’ reading of The Great Gatsby in the historical context of early-twentieth-century nativism, recent critics have interpreted Fitzgerald’s allusion to racialist discourse as a linking of class with race, perceiving the narrative of social mobility as representing a kind of “passing [which] is figuratively rendered in terms of racial black- ness” (Lewis 174).
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's
GREAT GATSBY.qxd 1/20/2015 2:43 PM Page i F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S THE GREAT GATSBY ADAPTED FOR THE STAGE BY SIMON LEVY # # DRAMATISTS PLAY SERVICE INC. GREAT GATSBY.qxd 1/20/2015 2:43 PM Page 2 THE GREAT GATSBY Copyright © 2013, Simon Levy All Rights Reserved CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performance of THE GREAT GATSBY is subject to payment of a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all coun- tries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention, the Universal Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including without limitation professional/amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, all other forms of mechanical, electronic and digital reproduction, transmission and distribution, such as CD, DVD, the Internet, private and file-sharing networks, information storage and retrieval sys- tems, photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed upon the matter of readings, permission for which must be secured from the Adaptor’s agent in writing. The English language stock and amateur stage performance rights in the United States, its territo- ries, possessions and Canada for THE GREAT GATSBY are controlled exclusively by DRAMA- TISTS PLAY SERVICE, INC., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016.
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The Great Gatsby Is Set in the Mid-1920S, a Prosperous Time at Home and Lesson3lesson Two 3 Abroad
Examining an author’s life can inform and expand the reader’s understanding of a novel. Biographical criticism is the practice of analyzing a literary work through the lens of an author’s experience. In this lesson, explore the author’s life to understand the novel more fully. 1 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Minnesota childhood and New York adventures inspire Lesson3Lesson One 3 events in Nick’s and Gatsby’s lives. As a child, Fitzgerald liked to imagine he was from British royalty and had been abandoned on his parents’ FOCUS: doorstep. A weak student, Fitzgerald was sent to boarding school. His parents hoped that this education would improve his prospects. Like the Biography characters in the novel, Fitzgerald took a train from his Midwest home in St. Paul, Minnesota, to New York City. Many of his short stories explore the effects that a physical departure from the Midwest could have on a person. ?? Discussion Activities Listen to The Big Read Audio Guide. Students should take notes as they listen. Ask students to discuss what they learned about F. Scott Fitzgerald from the Audio Guide. Distribute Reader’s Guide essays, “F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896–1940,” “Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age,” and “Fitzgerald and His Other Works.” Divide the class into groups. Assign one essay to each group. After reading and discussing the essays, each group will present what it learned from the essay. Ask students to add a creative twist to make their presentations memorable. ?? Writing Exercise The novel begins with a quote from Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, a character from Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise: “Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; / If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, / Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, / I must have you!” What does this poem mean? Ask students to examine the intention behind this epigraph.
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