As you read the following sentences, how do the word choices, sentence structures, and punctuation marks affect you? Paying close attention to the sounds of the words as well as their meanings, the order of the ideas, and the pauses signaled by the punctuation, describe your experience of the sentence or sentences. What meaning can you find in the sentences, or what do the sentences tell you about the subject being described?
The first one is done as an example.
1. On Sunday morning while the church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn. (61)
Example Answer: Sunday morning and church bring in a religious dimension. I wonder if it is ironic. “The world and its mistress” echoes something my father used to say something like “Everybody and his brother” was going so it would be really crowded. “The world and its mistress” is a way of saying lots of people. But a “mistress” is an illicit lover, so coming right after the church bells this is ironic. These people “twinkled hilariously.” How can people twinkle? Maybe their clothes are fancy and they have lots of jewelry. I can almost hear them laughing and twinkling.
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2. He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. (64)
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3. Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor. (78)
this is for the book The Great Gatsby
