Grade 9 Literary Analysis Worksheet
This worksheet helps 9th-grade students practice analyzing literary texts, focusing on theme, characterization, and literary devices.
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Grade 9 Literary Analysis Worksheet
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Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Pay close attention to literary devices, character development, and underlying themes.
Excerpt from 'The Great Gatsby' 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 any one,' 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. It was a habit of mind then, and he kept it up all his life, 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 unfeigned 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, this creative temperament, 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.
1. What literary device is primarily used in the father's advice to his son: 'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'?
Metaphor
Irony
Foreshadowing
Theme
2. The narrator describes Gatsby's 'extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness'. What does this description reveal about the narrator's initial perception of Gatsby?
He finds Gatsby's optimism naive and foolish.
He admires Gatsby's unique capacity for idealism.
He views Gatsby as manipulative and untrustworthy.
He is indifferent to Gatsby's personality.
3. The opening lines establish the narrator's , which is his tendency to reserve judgment.
4. The phrase 'foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams' is an example of , suggesting a negative outcome.
5. Explain how the narrator's initial claim of tolerance is complicated by his later admission of its limits. Provide specific textual evidence to support your answer.
6. Analyze the significance of the narrator's description of Gatsby as having 'an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness'. How does this characterization foreshadow or explain Gatsby's eventual fate in the novel?