Read through Gatsby with a continued Formalist eye. These are the essential questions of a Formalist reading. Be sure that you are adding to your Dialectical (readers) journal.

• How is the work structured or organized? How does it begin? Where does it go next? How does it end? What is the work’s plot? How is its plot related to its structure? 
• What is the relationship of each part of the work to the work as a whole? How are the parts related to one another? 
• Who is narrating or telling what happens in the work? How is the narrator, speaker, or character revealed to readers? How do we come to know and understand this figure? 
• Who are the major and minor characters, what do they represent, and how do they relate to one another? 
• What are the time and place of the work – its setting? How is the setting related to what we know of the characters and their actions? To what extent is the setting symbolic? 
• What kind of language does the author use to describe, narrate, explain, or otherwise create the world of the literary work? More specifically, what images, similes, metaphors, symbols appear in the work? What is their function? What meanings do they convey? (DiYanni 1562).

(DiYanni, Robert. Literature Approaches to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008).