American Literature / Unit 19 AML 1821 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Drill 7: The Billboard and the Novel
The idea
The board asks in which novel the author suggests the vacancy of old orders of belief, ideals or virtues by the image of sightless eyes looking down from a billboard, offering The Great Gatsby, Light in August, The Sun Also Rises, To Kill a Mockingbird and Native Son. The answer is The Great Gatsby. The image is the faded advertisement for an oculist, Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, whose enormous blue eyes behind yellow spectacles stand over the valley of ashes, unrepaired, and which a grieving character takes for the eyes of God. Everything the question says is in that description: eyes that cannot see, raised above a wasteland, mistaken for a belief nobody tends any more.
In practice
An oculist's sign, taken for God.
Where people slip
Faulkner and Hemingway are in the options because they are Fitzgerald's contemporaries. The billboard is specific and belongs to one book, so the answer turns on the image, not on the period.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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