Critical Summary At the completion of reading chapter 1, end your Cornell notes with a critical summary of the chapter. Summarize Nick’s introduction of the story and the characters: tell about the surface level of the story. Comment on Fitzgerald’s use of literary techniques: respond to the author’s style AND elaborate on your opinions through analytical points (about what’s below the surface).

Critical Summary example of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost This poem is about a man hiking through the woods who comes to a fork in the road where, after a while, he decides to walk down one of the two paths (they’re both about the same), and he says that later in life he’ll tell the story of how taking that particular path made a big difference. As this poem uses these two roads as an extended metaphor for making decisions in life, Frost has effectively crafted a thought-provoking poem about how we look back on our lives. First, he describes these choices as being “about the same,” and then he’s vague about which path he even took, but he finally emphasizes in the last stanza how he’ll later say this decision “made all the difference,” when maybe it was inconsequential. He slickly uses this ambiguity to build a theme on the self-deception we use when we construct the story of our own lives, inspiring his readers to explore how we may tend to lie to ourselves and others in rationalizing our life choices.