1. What are the themes of this novel?

Honesty

Honesty is does not seem to determine which characters are sympathetic and which are not in this novel in quite the same way that it does in others. Nick is able to admire Gatsby despite his knowledge of the man’s illegal dealings and bootlegging. Ironically, it is the corrupt Daisy who takes pause at Gatsby’s sordid past. Her indignation at his “dishonesty,” however, is less moral than class-based. Her sense of why Gatsby should not behave in an immoral manner is based on what she expects from members of her milieu, rather than what she believes to be intrinsically right. The standards for honesty and morality seem to be dependent on class and gender in this novel. Tom finds his wife’s infidelity intolerable, however, he does not hesitate to lie to her about his own affair.

Decay

Decay is a word that constantly comes up in The Great Gatsby, which is appropriate in a novel which centers around the death of the American Dream. Decay is most evident in the so-called “valley of ashes.” With great virtuosity, Fitzgerald describes a barren wasteland which probably has little to do with the New York landscape and instead serves to comment on the downfall of American society. It seems that the American dream has been perverted, reversed. Gatsby lives in West Egg and Daisy in East Egg; therefore, Gatsby looks East with yearning, rather than West, the traditional direction of American frontier ambitions. Fitzgerald portrays the chauvinistic and racist Tom in a very negative light, clearly scoffing at his apocalyptic vision of the races intermarrying. Fitzgerald’s implication seems to be that society has already decayed enough and requires no new twist.

Gender Roles

In some respects, Fitzgerald writes about gender roles in a quite conservative manner. In his novel, men work to earn money for the maintenance of the women. Men are dominant over women, especially in the case of Tom, who asserts his physical strength to subdue them. The only hint of a role reversal is in the pair of Nick and Jordan. Jordan’s androgynous name and cool, collected style masculinize her more than any other female character. However, in the end, Nick does exert his dominance over her by ending the relationship. The women in the novel are an interesting group, because they do not divide into the traditional groups of Mary Magdalene and Madonna figures, instead, none of them are pure. Myrtle is the most obviously sensual, but the fact that Jordan and Daisy wear white dresses only highlights their corruption.

Violence

Violence is a key theme in The Great Gatsby, and is most embodied by the character of Tom. An ex-football player, he uses his immense physical strength to intimidate those around him. When Myrtle taunts him with his wife’s name, he strikes her across the face. The other source of violence in the novel besides Tom are cars. A new commodity at the time that The Great Gatsby was published, Fitzgerald uses cars to symbolize the dangers of modernity and the dangers of wealth. The climax of the novel, the accident that kills Myrtle, is foreshadowed by the conversation between Nick and Jordan about how bad driving can cause explosive violence. The end of the novel, of course, consists of violence against Gatsby. The choice of handgun as a weapon suggests Gatsby’s shady past, but it is symbolic that it is his love affair, not his business life, that kills Gatsby in the end.

Class

Class is an unusual theme for an American novel. It is more common to find references to it in European, especially British novels. However, the societies of East and West Egg are deeply divided by the difference between the noveau riche and the older moneyed families. Gatsby is aware of the existence of a class structure in America, because a true meritocracy would put him in touch with some of the finest people, but, as things stand, he is held at arm’s length. Gatsby tries desperately to fake status, even buying British shirts and claiming to have attended Oxford in an attempt to justify his position in society. Ultimately, however, it is a class gulf that separates Gatsby and Daisy, and cements the latter in her relationship to her husband, who is from the same class as she is.

Religion

It is interesting that Fitzgerald chooses to use some religious tropes in a novel that focuses on the American Dream, a concept which leaves no room for religion save for the doctrine of individualism. The most obvious is the image of the “valley of ashes,” which exemplifies America’s moral state during the “Roaring Twenties.” This wasteland is presided over by the empty eyes of an advertisement. Fitzgerald strongly implies that these are the eyes of God. This equation of religion with advertising and material gain are made even more terrifying by the fact that the eyes see nothing and can help no one (for example, this “God” can do nothing to prevent Myrtle or Gatsby’s deaths).

World War I

Because The Great Gatsby is set in the Roaring Twenties, the topic of the Great War is unavoidable. The war was crucial to Gatsby’s development, providing a brief period of social mobility which, Fitzgerald claims, quickly closed after the war. Gatsby only came into contact with a classy young debutante like Daisy as a result of the fact that he was a soldier and that no one could vouch for whether he was upper-class or not. The war provided him with further opportunities to see the world, and make some money in the service of a millionaire. Gatsby’s opportunities closed up after the end of the war, however, when he found upon returning to America that the social structure there was every bit as rigid as it was in Europe. Unable to convince anyone that he is truly upper-class (although his participation in the war gave him some leeway about lying), Gatsby finds himself unable to break into East Egg society.

2. What might the valley of ashes symbolize?

Literally, the Valley of Ashes is a massive trash dump. Valley of ashes symbolize the destruction of the human civilization and humanity.The rotting valley represents the rotting American dream. Tom, Daisy, and Jordan, with their endless socials and superficial lives represent how material excess rots their very souls. Their lives, like the valley, are hollow. As time goes on the valley gets ranker as do the lives of many characters in the novel. Self-centered individuals litter the story with meaningless “trash”, much like the valley itself.

3. Why is Gatsby attractive to Daisy?

Gatsby’s worship of Daisy is closely tied to his attitude toward money. Fitzgerald, in his personal life, was very aware of the importance of money. Gatsby once says that Daisy’s voice is “full of money” in chapter 7. Gatsby is attractive to Daisy because she is rich, but at the same time he has no designs on her wealth. He will not try to win her again until he has wealth of his own.

4. How do you understand that Daisy choose Tom not Gatsby?

At that time, Daisy is actually a sort of financial prisoner. Her lifestyle depends on Tom’s money. She has no real way of making money on her own. Gatsby has money, but his wealth, like his whole future, is precarious.

5. In what ways does the Gatsby’s party reflect Jazz Age decadence?

Gatsby’s party is both a description and parody of Jazz Age decadence. It exemplifies the spirit of conspicuous consumption, and is a queer mix of the lewd and the respectable. Though catered to by butlers and serenaded by professionally trained singers, the guests are drunk, crude, and boisterous. The orchestra plays a work by Tostoff called The Jazz History of the World; though it had had a fantastic reception at Carnegie Hall, the piece is the antithesis of classical respectability.

6. How does the plot unfold through the narrative point of view?

Two things about the narrative structure are important here. First, everything the reader learns comes through Nick Carraway—either through Nick’s own experience or what he has learned from others. Nick narrates the events of the story not in the order they occur, but in the order Fitzgerald wants them presented. Second, and at least as important, the events are described as Nick sees them. All the complex attitudes and emotions that contribute to the tone of the novel are conveyed to the reader through Nick’s consciousness.

7. Is Nick Carraway a reliable narrator?

Nick Carraway is on the whole a reliable narrator. Because he follows his father’s advice on toleration, he does not make quick judgments, and thus is able to gain access to “many curious natures” and become “privy” to unsought confidences. The magic power of Carraway lies in the fact that he has contact with them all, intimate enough to weave them skillfully into the unified fabric of the dramatic tapestry that is The Great Gatsby.

8. In what ways can you see the classes’ differences in the novel?

The world of Gatsby is inhabited in the main by three groups of people socially distinct from one another in behavior, language, and everything else. The first group includes Tom, Daisy and their friends, rich, arrogant, contemptuous, pretentious, talking about science and art and reading the socially polite Saturday Evening Post, but definitely lacking in intellectuality. The second group is made up of people like the Wilsons, vulgar, speaking in bad grammar, and reading gossipy Tatler. Then there is Gatsby, one of the “wild, unknown men” who is worthy of the whole bunch of the others and whose secret griefs make Carraway see the world anew.

9. Does Fitzgerald wish us to accept Nick’s judgments?

The answer to that is a qualified yes. Nick’s opinions about Gatsby and the other major characters are meant to be accurate. But at the same time, as we will see later, Nick’s world view does not serve him well. He calls himself honest, and unlike many people who say that about themselves, he seems to be so. He thinks of himself as able to reserve judgment about others. He is aloof and cynical but fundamentally good-hearted. He is very intelligent and very smooth socially, with the self-confidence that comes from an established social position. All of these qualities contribute to his very highly developed moral sense.

10.For Nick his friendship with Gatsby is the only redeeming experience of his time in the East, why?

Nick loves Gatsby’s yearning, his imaginative idealism, his reaching for some indefinable glamorous goal. Early in the novel Nick calls it “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness”. Yet Nick despises all that Gatsby stands for. Gatsby’s idealism is entirely misdirected. He worships a sort of life filled with wonder, excitement, fine things, and absolute self-worth. Gatsby’s vision is crude, corrupted form of the American Dream.

11.Nick’s analytical intelligence has saved him from the trap in which the unsophisticated Gatsby has been destroyed. Is it true?

He has, of course, escaped this trap, but he is caught in another; he has nothing left but desolation and despair. He has become the perfect person to tell Gatsby’s story and to produce the mood, tone, and dimensions Fitzgerald wished it to have. For the story is much more than a disillusionment with the pursuit of a rich girl or with the admiration of a monied class. The disillusionment is with contemporary American culture and in a sense with modern Western civilization.

12.What kind of Fitzgerald’s world view can you see in this novel?

Fitzgerald’s world view in The Great Gatsby is of a piece with the spirit of the United States in the 1920s—a strange mixture of cynicism and outraged idealism, of despair and hysterical vitality. The primary reason was that the United States had just emerged from World War I, a war that had come as a surprise to most people. For the preceding two generations there had been a feeling that civilization was at last outgrowing war. Soon there would be no more wars. At the same time poets and philosophers yearned for the nobility and self-sacrifice that they believed war produced.

13.The decade of the 1920s is often referred to as the “Roaring Twenties.” Describe Gatsby’s party. How could it be considered a good reflection of the 1920s era?

The noveau riche that populate Gatsby’s parties are the epitome of the vapid pursuit of material wealth. Nobody seems particularly happy. This goes for Gatsby as well. He sits alone like a third person watching and pining after a girl (Daisy) that is more illusion than anything else. The parties are large drunken spectacles. This was supposed to be the American Dream but underneath it was rotten to its core.

14.What is Tom Buchanan like in Nick’s eyes?

From the beginning Nick feels reservations about these people; eventually he comes to feel a deep aversion to them. Tom Buchanan is almost a caricature of the American Dream. He is wealthy Ivy League school, and he has married a beautiful woman. But he is also stupid, brutal, and bored, mouthing ideas he has stolen and cannot even remember correctly from third-rate books. Nick learns of his infidelity and watches him break his mistress’ nose for mentioning Daisy’s name. Nick guesses correctly that Buchanan sent the homicidally furious Wilson to Gatsby’s house, knowing that he would probably kill Gatsby. Nick finally prefers not to meet Tom again and only grudgingly shakes hand with him.

15.What was the American Dream in the novel?

The American Dream promised the deepest and richest self-fulfillment for those who would make the most of their natural abilities. It was, of course, partly about money and comfort, but it was also bout achievement and dignity. All that is left of it in Fitzgerald’s novel is a crude pursuit of wealth and the superficial glamor that wealth provides. Those who have wealth, like the Buchanans, are shallow, empty, bored, unhappy people. Gatsby’s tragedy is that his vague yearning for greatness has taken the only form available to him—a passion for the world of Daisy Buchanan.

16. Gatsby’s personal life has assumed a magnitude as a “cultural-historical allegory” for the nation. Why?

Gatsby’s life follows a clear pattern: at first, a dream, then a disenchantment, and finally a sense of failure and despair. In this, Gatsby’s personal experience approximates the whole of the American experience up to the first few decades of the twentieth century. America had been fresh and green and new, had “pandered to the last and greatest of all human dreams” and promised something like “the orgiastic future” for humanity. Now the virgin forests have vanished and made way for a modern civilization, the only fitting symbol of which is the “valley of ashes,” the living hell. Here modern men live in sterility and meaninglessness and futility as best illustrated by Gatsby’s essentially pointless parties. The crowds hardly know their hose; many come and go without invitation. The music, the laughter and the faces, all blurred as one confused mass, signify the purposelessness and loneliness of the party-goers beneath their masks of relaxation and joviality. The shallowness of Daisy whose voice is “full of money,” the restless wickedness of Tom, the representative of the egocentric, careless rich, and Gatsby who is, on the one hand, charmingly innocent enough to believe that the past can be recovered and resurrected, but is on the other hand, both corrupt and corrupting, tragically convinced of the power of money, however it is made, and in addition, the behavior of these and other people like the Wilsons—all clearly denote the vanishing of the great expectations which the first settlement of the American continent had inspired. The hope is gone; despair and doom have set in. Thus Gatsby’s personal life has assumed a magnitude as a “cultural-historical allegory” for the nation. Here, then, lies the greatest intellectual achievement that Fitzgerald ever achieved.

What commentary do you have on The Great Gatsby?

The Great Gatsby is an American classic, generally regarded as Fitzgerald’s finest work. It extends and synthesizes the themes that pervade all of his fiction: the callous indifference of wealth, the hollowness of the American success myth, and the sleaziness of contemporary scene. With T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and Earnest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby is a major contribution to the creative record of the barren spirituality of the 20th century.