Example of a good analysis of a line from "Beast in the Jungle"

The paper below is not perfect (there are some mechanical issues, and the conclusion strikes me as a little weak), but it's very, very good, and it really does exactly what I was asking you all to do in that paper.  If you're revising, looking at this paper might be helpful.

Wildcard

Here’s the thing about reading James.  It isn’t linear.  That is, there are multiple interpretations and the meanings branch out.  Whereas this is a technique used by many writers, if unintentionally, James makes it the main driving force behind his work.  This ambiguity and double meaning comes through on all levels – words, sentences, paragraphs.  One such example is the paragraph split between pages 435 and 436, towards the end of the fourth chapter.  The paragraph itself has very little action (though a substantial amount compared to the story as a whole) and little explicit reflection on life.  However, it should not be overlooked.  In fact, it could be considered the climax of the story.  Within the paragraph, an analogous phenomenon occurs with the following sentence:

                   "She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited.” (pp. 435)
 

     At first glance, this sentence is straightforward.  Marcher waits because of May.  It could be read simply, and it does have valuable meaning.  May, even in her last moments, retains control over her man.  She calls the shots.  It is because of her that he waits.  The sentence is effective in that is creates suspense, dramatizes the silence and adds perhaps underserved gravity to a matter seemingly simple.  Reading the work as an account of women’s control over men finds a perfect symbol in this instant.

The clause after the semicolon is peculiar, though.  It seems to convey no information and seems oddly out of place.  On second reading, this becomes vexingly obvious.  It could be seen as a clarification.  “That is” is the spoken equivalent of “i.e.”.  It is an example used to dissolve ambiguity (ironically, its sole purpose here is to create it).  But this clarification, too, is ambiguous.  One possible meaning could be that he waited.  By simply leaving the first clause, one would think he waits May intended for him to wait.  The added detail, however, reveals that he actually waited because of her and not because she meant him to.  In fact, she has said all there was to say.  With her painful yet graceful steps, with her face …  “He saw in her face the truth”.  There is nothing left to wait for; everything is said!  Yet this arrogant and selfish act of waiting for more… this ignorance of what is right before his eyes and thirst for satisfaction of his perverted obsession… this defines Marcher’s character.  The poor woman is dying, and her only wish is for Marcher to open his eyes for one brief moment.  He doesn’t.

Yet the clarification could also be of different meaning.  Again, the casual reader skims over a slightly bothersome detail.  That detail is the word “only”.  One naturally recognizes it to mean that waiting was his only action at the given time.  However, that’s not it.  James wouldn’t include a word that is so mundane in meaning.  Of course he only waited!  That’s part of the definition of waiting.  No, James is too calculating with his words to let that slip.  Instead, “only” could have another meaning.  Instead of referring to the action, it refers to the subject!  Only Marcher waited.  Of course, the wording is of an order unusual, but that’s not weird because he has been doing that all along.  The implications of this, however, are a little troubling.  If May isn’t waiting, than that suggests that she is exactly where she wants to be.  This is a direct contradiction of the previous train of thought.  In fact, it changes the meaning of the paragraph!  It turns her desperate final attempt into a success story.  Or does it mean that she does not expect Marcher to respond?  One could easily make a case that it changes the meaning of the story, too.  With this idea of parallel stories in mind, one is prompted to re-read, this time conscious of multiple scenarios (almost a sort of meta-advertisement of the story).  And this is the beauty of this sentence and of his whole style.  It is powerful no matter how one interprets it.  Yet depending on which word he chooses to make his focus, it means very different things.  It is a wildcard.  It adds credibility to whichever mindset the reader is in – a perfect part of the whole.

Gatsby chapters 5 and 6

Is the architecture of the book becoming clear?  What do you think?  What do you like?  What do you wonder about?  The shift between chapter 5 and chapter 6 is quite abrupt, isn't it?  What do you make of it?

Gatsby, Chapter 4

What do you think?  Gatsby becomes even more intriguing!  How is Fitzgerald (or Nick, depending on how you look at it) choreographing the reader's experience?  What about Gatsby as a lens (what are we learning about Nick and others by the ways in which they see Gatsby?)?  What else?

Gatsby!

Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, is in many ways a perfect American novel.  It's an extremely tightly constructed novel, and it is brilliantly written on the sentence by sentence level.  Such perfection might be too neat and might feel airless--but Fitzgerald's writing is so virtuosically freewheeling and breezy that it never does feel that way to me (it's my own personal theory that Fitzgerald is not as good a writer as his narrator, Nick Adams, and that's why Gatsby is better than any of Fitzgerald's other productions).  In any case, the prose in Gatsby is lovely.  One way it's lovely is in the remarkable surrealism of its language, which manages to compress metaphors into single words and slip amazing images into the most casual of sentences. When you read chapter 1, try to notice examples of brilliant writing, and write a comment on this post quoting and briefly explaining your favorite example.