The Great Gatsby (Excerpt) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my younger and more **vulnerable** years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like **criticizing** anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a **reserved** way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In **consequence**, I’m **inclined** to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran **bores**. The **abnormal** mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was **privy** to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have **feigned** sleep, **preoccupation**, or a hostile **levity** when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was **quivering** on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually **plagiaristic** and marred by obvious **suppressions**. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father **snobbishly** suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out **unequally** at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my **tolerance**, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was **exempt** from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an **unaffected** **scorn**. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that **flabby** impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the **abortive** sorrows and short-winded **elations** of men.(Excerpted from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Vocabulary List

Here are important words from the article that can help you understand it better. Try to guess their meaning from the story first, then check the definitions.

Comprehension Questions

Answer these questions about the opening of *The Great Gatsby*.

  1. What advice did the narrator's father give him, and what does it mean to "reserve all judgments"?
  2. How has the narrator's practice of reserving judgments both helped and harmed him?
  3. Why was the narrator able to hear the "secret griefs of wild, unknown men" in college?
  4. What is the narrator's ultimate confession about his tolerance?
  5. What quality does the narrator find in Gatsby that makes him "exempt" from the narrator's general disgust with the world?
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