了不起的盖茨比英文读书报告

Book Report of The Great Gatsby
The introduction about the author:
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, and the most famous one is The Great Gatsby.Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age. The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925, and it has been republished in 1945 and 1953. There are two settings for the novel. The first setting is on Long Island's North Shore and the second major setting is in New York City. The book is set within the year 1922 from the spring to the autumn.
Summary of this book:
Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who had graduated from Yale, moved to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn about the bond business. He rented a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a group who had made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who were prone to garish displays of wealth. Nick’s next-door neighbor in West Egg was a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lived in a gigantic Gothic mansion and threw extravagant parties every Saturday night.Nick was unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was educated at Yale and had social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class. Nick drove out to East Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, an erstwhile classmate of Nick’s at Yale. Daisy and Tom introduce d Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical
young woman with whom Nick began a romantic relationship. Nick also leart a bit ab out Daisy and Tom’s marriage: Jordan t old him that Tom had a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lived in the valley of ashes, a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this revelation, Nick travelled to New York City with Tom and Myrtle. At a vulgar, gaudy party in the apartment that Tom kept for the affair, Myrtle began to taunt Tom about Daisy, and Tom responded by breaking her nose.As the summer progressed, Nick eventually garnered an invitation to one of Gatsby’s legenda ry parties. He encountered Jordan Baker at the party, and they met Gatsby himself, a surprisingly young man who had a remarkable smile and called everyone “old sport.” Gatsby ask ed to speak to Jordan alone, and through Jordan, Nick later leart more about his mysterious neighbor. Gatsby told Jordan that he knew Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and was deeply in love with her. He spent many nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion. Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle and wild parties were simply an attempt to impress Daisy. Gatsby now wanted Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy, but he was afraid that Daisy would refuse to see him if she knew that he still loved her. Nick invited Daisy to have tea at his house, without telling her that Gatsby would also be there. After an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablished their connection. They begin an affair.
After a short time, Tom grew increasingly suspicious of his wife’s relationship with Gatsby. At a luncheon at the Buchanans’ house, Gatsby stare d at Daisy with such undisguised passion that Tom realized Gatsby is in love with her. Though Tom involved in an extramarital affair, he was deeply outraged by the thought that his wife could be unfaithful to him. He forced the group to drive into New York City, where he confronted Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom asserted that he and Daisy had a history that Gatsby could never understand, and he announced to his wife that Gatsby was a criminal—his fortune came from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. Daisy realized that her allegiance was to Tom, and Tom contemptuously sent her back to East Egg with Gatsby, attempting to prove that Gatsby could not hurt him.
When Nick, Jordan, and Tom drove through the valley of ashes, however, they discovered that Gatsby’s car ha d struck and killed Myrtle, Tom’s lover. They rushed back to Long Island, where Nick leart from Gatsby that Daisy was driving the car when it struck Myrtle, but that Gatsby intended to take the blame. The next day, Tom told Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car. George, who had leapt to the conclusion that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle must have had been her lover, found Gatsby in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He then fatally shot himself. Nick staged a small funeral for Gatsby, ended his relationship with Jordan, and moved back to the Midwest to escape the disgust he felt for the people surrounding Gatsby’s life and for the emptiness and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast. Nick reflected that just as Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism had disintegrated into the mere pursuit of w ealth. Though Gatsby’s power to transform his dreams into reality made him “great,” Nick reflect ed that the era of dreaming—both Gatsby’s dream and the American dream—was over.。