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Notes on The Great Gatsby Chapter 1 Characters Introduced: * Nick Carraway - A wealthy mid-westerner in his mid-twenties who fought in world war one, currently working in New York city and living next door to Mr.Gastby. * Daisy - Nick's second cousin is very cynical and bored with the rich life, married to Tom Buchanan. * Tom Buchanan - Nick's friend from Yale, very wealthy and successful, and very pretentious. * Jordan Baker - A golfer who spends time with the Buchanan's, also very snooty. Literary Period: * "I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War"(7) - World War One is spoken of as the great war * "Just as things grow in fast movies"(8) - Stop motion movies were a novelty at that time. * Everybody invests or talks about stocks. Style: * Complex wording and sentence structure: "But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone - he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling."(25) Characterization: * "It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."(17) - Tom claims to very educated, but he speaks incorrectly, saying "proved" instead of "proven" * "Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart." - Sums up Tom's attitude; he wants to be better than someone, so he finds snooty books with illogical ideas to back up his racist feeling of superiority. Literary Devices: * "secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew"(8) - allusion to King Midas and other fables. * "their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."(12) - simile. * "on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon"(12) - simile * "as if each speech is in arrangement of notes that will never be played again."(13) - simile. Summary: The author, Nick Carraway moves to the New York area to become a bond man. He spends the afternoon with his second cousin, Daisy, and her husband Tom Buchanan, who are very wealthy, and the evening is filled with a lot of talk about nothing, except that Tom has a mistress somewhere.