End of Book Character Analysis Hand-in

We have learned a bit about the thinking of Sigmund Freud, Frederick Nietzsche, Viktor Frankl (as well as Plato and others). Choose three characters. Two can be Jay, Tom, Daisy or Nick and one needs to be someone else from the book. Choose three famous philosophers/psychologists to analyse characters with. Two can be Freud, Nietzsche or Frankl and one needs to be someone else. Use format #2. Either write three little essays, each with a thesis saying the work of your chosen thinker would provide important insights into your chosen character, or one big essay addressing all three, with a thesis which says that applying the thinking of noted philosophers and psychologists sheds light on characters in fiction.

Pair each Gatsby character up with one famous philosopher or psychologist (know which you’re dealing with), and analyse him or her in a small written piece which is well organized, and quotes directly both from The Great Gatsby and from the writings of the famous thinker you’ve chosen to pair him or her with. Integrate the quotes, so the first few words in the sentence are yours. Your sentence must name the person quoted before you start the quote. Again using quotes you already used in your chapter work is perfectly acceptable. Smart, even.

Ensure you have a minimum of three distinct points to present about each of your three characters. Think about what the theorist/thinker you have chosen would say about this character’s life journey, goals, motivations, interactions with others, ethics and struggles. You are not comparing your Gatsby character to your philosopher/theorist. You are imagining what your philosopher/theorist would have to say about the Gatsby character, if your thinker were to read Gatsby and analyse that character.

Citation: use proper MLA format (with footnotes[1], rather than parenthetical or endnote citation, and a works cited page at the end) to cite your sources[2]. I will go very easy on you and allow you to cite secondary sources like Goodreads, Brainquotes or similar, for your famous thinker/theorist.[3] You won’t be doing that at university, though. (Because Goodreads and BrainQuotes are sites that do not cite their quotations. This isn’t very academic at all.) I will insist upon you correctly citing, in MLA format (google that) your quotes from The Great Gatsby[4] using MLA style citation for your Works Cited page. Cite Gatsby and URLs you drew quotes from, in MLA format, for it.

I will remove marks for failures to follow The Stop! Sheet exactly. Three Stop! Sheet failures and I’ll return the whole thing to you to fix up.

Introduction: your intro paragraph should say something very like:

Sigmund Freud’s personality theory provides valuable insight into the character of Dora Flowerbottom in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Her behaviour, her life goals, and her interactions with other characters are the very sorts of things that Freud extensively wrote about concerning his patients in the early twentieth century. Dora is a creature who is blown about by the gusts of her own primal urges and instant gratification, serving an almost entirely unrestrained id.

Conclusion: your concluding paragraph should restate the same things as your intro paragraph, but with wording that is different enough as to sound like something other than word-for-word repetition.

mooremade

[1] Like this. On the same page as the quote.

[2] Frankl p67

[3] Goodreads

[4] Fitzgerald p46