The Great Gatsby - Chapter Two

In this chapter, the status hierarchy is established. This is introduced through the meeting with Tom and Mr Wilson. Tom greets Mr Wilson in a condescending manner by "slapping him jovially on the shoulder" while saying "Hello, Wilson, old man,". This type of behaviour normally occurs between friends, however Tom and Mr Wilson are none of the sort. Instead, Tom is invading Mr Wilson's personal space and not caring because to Tom, Mr Wilson is not important.

This is the chapter where Myrtle is also introduced. Though Myrtle married a handy man with little status and lives in a standard, run-of-the-mill house, she is a lover of beauty and a social climber and finds that her only escape from the Valley of Ashes is through an affair with a wealthy, high status man. Her attempts to climb in status is shown at the party she holds in her apartment. As the party begins Mrs Wilson changes her outfit and "with the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur." However, though she now appears to be a women of status, moments later when she is speaking to a guest, her heritage and true status shines through as she uses the term "fellas", language used by the lower class,also her voice is described as "mincing" which undermines the beauty of her appearance described earlier. This reinforces one of the ideas that Fitzgerald presents, that your heritage, family background and status matter and cannot be ignored.

Myrtle's apartment is also a projected symbol for the world Myrtle lives in as the apartment comes across distorted as "The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it....The only picture was a over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room." - the idea of the furniture being too large for the apartment suggests that like the furniture, Myrtle, too, is out of place. "hard dog-biscuits - one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk" suggests decay and corruption and points to the affair between Myrtle and Tom.

The Great Gatsby - pg16+

Daisy is shown to be a theatrical character and appears very naive and ignorant. This is shown through her treatment of her husband's affair. After Tom's mistress has called the house while Daisy and guests were at the table, though Daisy "glances searchingly at Miss Baker then at [Nick]" as though she seems to be panicking, she looks outside and describes the nightingale on the lawn as "romantic" and share this feeling of romance with Tom, though moments before he was on the phone to his mistress. The fact that Miss Baker thought "everybody knew" about the affair, and was surprised when Nick did not, suggests that the affair is not well hidden, either due to accident, or lack of sparing his wife's feeling, in any case, it portrays Daisy's habit of putting 'her head in the sand' and not addressing Tom, as fear of the outcome.

Also the fact that when Miss Baker tried explaining that "Tom's got some women in New York" to Nick and Nick replied "blankly" "Got some woman?", unable to grasp the meaning of what Miss Baker was saying shows that there is a world hidden for Nick. That though he is within, he is also without as some concepts of this world are hard for Nick to comprehend.

Chapter two (pg22) is the introduction of the Valley of Ashes where the Wilson's live. The area is described to be full of "hills and grotesque gardens". The contrasting images of "grotesque" and "gardens" is strong, as "gardens" are normally associated with beauty, but placed with the adjective "grotesque", the two ideas clash. The description of the town makes it become non-existent, similar to a ghosts town as it is referred to as a "solemn dumping ground"(pg22)

The Great Gatsby - Depiction of the Buchanan's in the opening chapter

Tom Buchanan is shown in the opening chapter a man of control and authority as when Nick is referring to having been invited for dinner he refers to both Tom and Daisy as the "Tom Buchanas"(pg8). This is reinforced as Nick approaches the Buchanan's house for dinner and "Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch"(pg9). This stance portrays pride and protectiveness to what is his. He controls Nick right from the moment Nick has stepped foot on their property. "I've got a nice place here,"(pg10) he says and then "[turns Nick] around by one arm"(pg10) and announces that they will "go inside"(pg10).

Daisy presents the opposite persona however. Nick and Daisy are distant cousins, and even barely at that as Nick refers Daisy to an "old friend whom [he] scarcely knew at all". Daisy however, treats Nick as though they are personally very close when she "held [Nick's] hand for a moment, looking up into [Nick's] face, promising that there was no one else in the world she wanted to see."

Commentary on The Tollund Man

In the poem "The Tollund Man", Heaney explores what the Tollund man means to the Irish common people and then what it means to him as a poet. The "country people" or "turfcutters" as Heaney refers to the Irish community as, see the Tollund man as a type of saint, a holy figure that defines their identity. In the third stanza, the tollund man is referred to having a "saint's kept body" as the waters of "fen" have not devoured its victim but transfered the sacrificed, unidentified man into a saint. Whereas, this leads Heaney great shame as the Irish community, people that define who he is, cannot see the brutality and wrongness of the Tollund man. Heaney does not see him as a "saint", as one to be admired but as a murder due to unconventional religious beliefs. Heaney employs the metaphor of the "country people, Not knowing their tongue." to explain the common man illiteracy as they do not understand the archetype of the Tollund Man and what he truely represents.

Seamus Heaney - P.V Glob

Peter Vilhelm Glob was a Danish archaeologist. His most famous of investigations was of Denmark's bog bodies such as Tollund Man and Grauballe Man (mummified remains of Iron and Bronze Age people found preserved bogs)

Seamus Heaney: Northern Ireland History

Home rule – (1919) Northern Ireland receives self-government within the United Kingdom. Under the Government of Ireland Act was in some respects left to its own devices.

The first years of the new independent region were marked by bitter violence, particularly in Belfast. Many died in political violence from 1920.

The continuing violence created a climate of fear in the new region, and there was migration across the new border. As well as movement of Protestants from the Free State into Northern Ireland, some Catholics fled south, leaving some of those who remained feeling isolated. Despite the mixed religious affiliation of the old Royal Irish Constabulary and the transfer of many Catholic RIC police officers to the newly formed Royal Ulster Constabulary (1922), northern Catholics did not join the new force in great numbers.

The troubles, starting in the late 1960s, consisted of about thirty years of recurring acts of intense violence between elements of Northern Ireland's nationalist community (principally Roman Catholic) and unionist community (principally Protestant) during which 3,254 people were killed. The conflict was caused by the disputed status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom and the discrimination against the nationalist minority by the dominant unionist majority.

Seamus Heaney

The life and artistic career of Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney - born 13 April 1939 - is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2006.

In August 1965 he married Marie Devlin and, in 1994, published Over Nine Waves, a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends. Heaney's first book, Eleven Poems, was published in November 1965 for the Queen's University Festival.
In 1967, Faber and Faber published his first major volume, called Death of a Naturalist. This collection met with much critical acclaim and went on to win several awards, the Gregory Award for Young Writers and the Geoffrey Faber Prize. Also in 1966, he was appointed as a lecturer in Modern English Literature at Queen's University Belfast.

Identify one of Heaney's poem to share with the class.

Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

The persona, I feel, sounds almost confused about the situation as at the beginning of the poem, the mood is set to be glum but the reasons are unsure as the emotions of the persona are not shown. It is only until the last line of the poem "A four foot box, a foot for every year." that the full impact of the poem really hits the reader. By the persona calling the body a "corpse" and feeling "embarrassed" when the "old men" shake his hand shows detachment from the situation - almost like the reader is blocking out the situation as best he can.