Making Important Connections to

The Great Gatsby

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Making a Text to Text Connection

“The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot

                       I

    We are the hollow men    We are the stuffed men    Leaning together    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!    Our dried voices, when    We whisper together    Are quiet and meaningless    As wind in dry grass    Or rats' feet over broken glass    In our dry cellar        Shape without form, shade without colour,    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;        Those who have crossed    With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom    Remember us-if at all-not as lost    Violent souls, but only    As the hollow men    The stuffed men.

                       II

    Eyes I dare not meet in dreams    In death's dream kingdom    These do not appear:    There, the eyes are    Sunlight on a broken column    There, is a tree swinging    And voices are    In the wind's singing    More distant and more solemn    Than a fading star.        Let me be no nearer    In death's dream kingdom    Let me also wear    Such deliberate disguises    Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves    In a field    Behaving as the wind behaves    No nearer-        Not that final meeting    In the twilight kingdom

III

    This is the dead land    This is cactus land    Here the stone images    Are raised, here they receive    The supplication of a dead man's hand    Under the twinkle of a fading star.        Is it like this    In death's other kingdom    Waking alone    At the hour when we are    Trembling with tenderness    Lips that would kiss    Form prayers to broken stone.

  IV

    The eyes are not here    There are no eyes here    In this valley of dying stars    In this hollow valley    This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms    

In this last of meeting places    We grope together    And avoid speech    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river        Sightless, unless    The eyes reappear    As the perpetual star    Multifoliate rose    Of death's twilight kingdom    The hope only    Of empty men.

                               V

    Here we go round the prickly pear    Prickly pear prickly pear    Here we go round the prickly pear    At five o'clock in the morning.        Between the idea    And the reality    Between the motion    And the act    Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom        Between the conception    And the creation    Between the emotion    And the response    Falls the Shadow                                   Life is very long        Between the desire    And the spasm    Between the potency    And the existence    Between the essence    And the descent    Falls the Shadow                                   For Thine is the Kingdom        For Thine is    Life is    For Thine is the        This is the way the world ends    This is the way the world ends    This is the way the world ends    Not with a bang but a whimper.

Making a Text to World Connection

Video Clip: “Mind Blown: Truth About Wealth Distribution”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJoHYr57Ccs

Making a Text to Self ConnectionHow does this passage from the novel make you feel? How can you

connect to it on a personal level?

About five o’clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate — first a motor hearse, horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and I in the limousine, and a little later four or five servants and the postman from West Egg in Gatsby’s station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I looked around. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found marvelling over Gatsby’s books in the library one night three months before.I’d never seen him since then. I don’t know how he knew about the funeral, or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses, and he took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsby’s grave.I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already too far away, and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur, “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,” and then the owl-eyed man said “Amen to that,” in a brave voice.We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke to me by the gate.“I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarked.“Neither could anybody else.”“Go on!” He started. “Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.” He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in.“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” he said.