Gatsby and More

The following are from two, well, let's call them sources. The first half or so are from the rest of the papers on The Great Gatsby that I hadn't graded before the last post. The rest are from my senior class's papers on various short stories. As always, these are sentences taken verbatim from student work, and my comments are in the ( ).

The Great Gatsby: written by an author one student called F. Scoot Fitzgerald.

- The novel shows the life that a wealthy person lives and how they deal with cretin circumstances. (Leave it to the rich to deal with the cretin circumstances.)

- Gatsby has a mysterious past that is later reviled.

- Gatsby dropped out of St. Olaf's Collage. (That would be "college." St. Olaf is near Minneapolis / St. Paul.)

- Gatsby got rich by distributing illegal alcohol in stolen securities. (The real secret was how he got all that liquor into the securities.)

- The American Dream is not worth fighting for what one wants in a dream.

- Myrtle also throws parts, and has fancy cloths.

- The result is how the American dream is corrupt and the dream is left with an empty goal.

- This book has a lot of meaning to it. (How much is "a lot" of meaning?)

- Behind closed doors the American dream was unreachable. (So open the doors.)

- T.J. Eckleburg is not just a bill bored.

Senior Short Story Essays:

- She loses the ability to distinguish between reality and imaginary.

- Bambara teaches her characters a lesson. (I hate those unruly characters who don't learn their lessons.)

- Mrs. Mallard has just been told that her husband is died.

- She grew up on a farm that raised foxes. (The farmer just raised corn. He left the real work to the farm itself.)

- The story revalues completely around her.

- Characters are used to tell the full story in a piece of literature. (Without characters you only get half the story.)

- Her attitude towards herself and other people show her contradicting personality as a well-off girl.

- The design makes a desperate women.

- In the end, she is found to do what she sees that wallpaper.

- Without characters the story is simply a description of the setting.

- This draws curiosity to the reader. (Here, kitty, kitty.)

As a little aside here at the end I must say, one thing that annoys greatly is when students feel the need to state the obvious. They will say something like, "Without the characters there would be no story." As if there was any great danger that a story would be written without the characters. As if the author was in danger of forgetting to populate his plot. Until next time:

Jeremiah