The Great Gatsby Study Guide
The Great Gatsby Study Guide
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was not a great success during his lifetime, but became a
smash hit after his death, especially after World War II. It has since become a staple of the canon
of American literature, and is taught at many high schools and universities across the country and
the world. Four films, an opera, and a play have been made from the text.
In the city, Tom takes Nick and Myrtle to the apartment in Morningside Heights at which
he maintains his affair. There, they have a lurid party with Myrtle's sister, Catherine, and an
abrasive couple named McKee. They gossip about Gatsby; Catherine says that he is somehow
related to Kaiser Wilhelm, the much-despised ruler of Germany during World War I. The more
she drinks, the more aggressive Myrtle becomes; she begins taunting Tom about Daisy, and he
reacts by breaking her nose. The party, unsurprisingly, comes to an abrupt end.
Nick Carraway attends a party at Gatsby's mansion, where he runs into Jordan Baker. At
the party, few of the attendees know Gatsby; even fewer were formally invited. Before the party,
Nick himself had never met Gatsby: he is a strikingly handsome, slightly dandified young man
who affects an English accent. Gatsby asks to speak to Jordan Baker alone; after talking with
Gatsby for quite a long time, she tells Nick that she has learned some remarkable news. She
cannot yet share it with him, however.
Some time later, Gatsby visits Nick's home and invites him to lunch. At this point in the
novel, Gatsby's origins are unclear. He claims to come from a wealthy San Francisco family, and
says that he was educated at Oxford after serving in the Great War (during which he received a
number of decorations). At lunch, Gatsby introduces Nick to his business associate, Meyer
Wolfsheim. Wolfhsheim is a notorious criminal; many believe that he is responsible for fixing
the 1919 World Series.
Gatsby mysteriously avoids the Buchanans. Later, Jordan Baker explains the reason for
Gatsby's anxiety: he had been in love with Daisy Buchanan when they met in Louisville before
the war. Jordan subtly intimates that he is still in love with her, and she with him.
Gatsby asks Nick to arrange a meeting between himself and Daisy. Gatsby has
meticulously planned their meeting: he gives Daisy a carefully rehearsed tour of his mansion,
and is desperate to exhibit his wealth and possessions. Gatsby is wooden and mannered during
this initial meeting; his dearest dreams have been of this moment, and so the actual reunion is
bound to disappoint. Despite this, the love between Gatsby and Daisy is revived, and the two
begin an affair.
Eventually, Nick learns the true story of Gatsby's past. He was born James Gatz in North
Dakota, but had his name legally changed at the age of seventeen. The gold baron Dan
Cody served as Gatsby's mentor until his death. Though Gatsby inherited nothing of Cody's
fortune, it was from him that Gatsby was first introduced to world of wealth, power, and
privilege.
While out horseback riding, Tom Buchanan happens upon Gatsby's mansion. There he
meets both Nick and Gatsby, to whom he takes an immediate dislike. To Tom, Gatsby is part of
the "new rich," and thus poses a danger to the old order that Tom holds dear. Despite this, he
accompanies Daisy to Gatsby's next party; there, he is exceedingly rude and condescending
toward Gatsby. Nick realizes that Gatsby wants Daisy to renounce her husband and her marriage;
in this way, they can recover the years they have lost since they first parted. Gatsby's great flaw
is that his great love of Daisy is a kind of worship, and that he fails to see her flaws. He believes
that he can undo the past, and forgets that Daisy's essentially small-minded and cowardly nature
was what initially caused their separation.
After his reunion with Daisy, Gatsby ceases to throw his elaborate parties. The only
reason he threw such parties was the chance that Daisy (or someone who knew her) might attend.
Daisy invites Gatsby, Nick and Jordan to lunch at her house. In an attempt to make Tom jealous,
and to exact revenge for his affair, Daisy is highly indiscreet about her relationship with Gatsby.
She even tells Gatsby that she loves him while Tom is in earshot.
Although Tom is himself having an affair, he is furious at the thought that his wife could
be unfaithful to him. He forces the group to drive into the city: there, in a suite at the Plaza Hotel,
Tom and Gatsby have a bitter confrontation. Tom denounces Gatsby for his low birth, and
reveals to Daisy that Gatsby's fortune has been made through illegal activities. Daisy's real
allegiance is to Tom: when Gatsby begs her to say that she does not love her husband, she
refuses him. Tom permits Gatsby to drive Daisy back to East Egg; in this way, he displays his
contempt for Gatsby, as well as his faith in his wife's complete subjection.
On the trip back to East Egg, Gatsby allows Daisy to drive in order to calm her ragged
nerves. Passing Wilson's garage, Daisy swerves to avoid another car and ends up hitting
Myrtle; she is killed instantly. Nick advises Gatsby to leave town until the situation calms.
Gatsby, however, refuses to leave: he remains in order to ensure that Daisy is safe. George
Wilson, driven nearly mad by the death of his wife, is desperate to find her killer. Tom Buchanan
tells him that Gatsby was the driver of the fatal car. Wilson, who has decided that the driver of
the car must also have been Myrtle's lover, shoots Gatsby before committing suicide himself.
After the murder, the Buchanans leave town to distance themselves from the violence for
which they are responsible. Nick is left to organize Gatsby's funeral, but finds that few people
cared for Gatsby. Only Meyer Wolfsheim shows a modicum of grief, and few people attend the
funeral. Nick seeks out Gatsby's father, Henry Gatz, and brings him to New York for the
funeral. From Henry, Nick learns the full scope of Gatsby's visions of greatness and his dreams
of self-improvement.
Thoroughly disgusted with life in New York, Nick decides to return to the Midwest.
Before his departure, Nick sees Tom Buchanan once more. Tom tries to elicit Nick's sympathy;
he believes that all of his actions were thoroughly justified, and he wants Nick to agree.
Nick muses that Gatsby, alone among the people of his acquaintance, strove to transform
his dreams into reality; it is this that makes him "great." Nick also believes, however, that the
time for such grand aspirations is over: greed and dishonesty have irrevocably corrupted both the
American Dream and the dreams of individual Americans.
Like the central character of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald had an intensely romantic
imagination; he once called it "a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life." The events of
Fitzgerald's own life can be seen as a struggle to realize those promises.
He attended both St. Paul Academy (1908-10) and Newman School (1911-13), where his
intensity and outsized enthusiasm made him unpopular with the other students. Later, at
Princeton University, he came close to the brilliant success of which he dreamed. He became
part of the influential Triangle Club, a dramatic organization whose members were taken from
the cream of society. He also became a prominent figure in the literary life of the university and
made lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. Despite these social
coups, Fitzgerald struggled academically, and he eventually flunked out of Princeton. In
November 1917, he joined the army.
While stationed at Camp Sheridan (near Montgomery, Alabama), he met Zelda Sayre, the
daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, and the two fell deeply in love. Fitzgerald needed
to improve his dismal financial circumstances, however, before he and Zelda could marry. At the
first opportunity, he left for New York, determined to make his fortune in the great city. Instead,
he was forced to take a menial advertising job at $90 per month. Zelda broke their engagement,
and Fitzgerald retreated to St. Paul, Minnesota. There, he rewrote a novel that he had begun at
Princeton. In the spring of 1920 the novel, This Side of Paradise, was published.
Though today's readers might find its ideas dated, This Side of Paradise was a revelation to
Fitzgerald's contemporaries. It was regarded as a rare glimpse into the morality and immorality
of America's youth, and it made Fitzgerald famous. Suddenly, the author could publish not only
in prestigious literary magazines such as Scribner's but also high-paying, popular publications
including The Saturday Evening Post.
Flush with his new wealth and fame, Fitzgerald finally married Zelda. The celebrated columnist
Ring Lardner christened them "the prince and princess of their generation." Though the
Fitzgeralds reveled in their notoriety, they also found it frightening, a fact which is perhaps
represented in the ending of Fitzgerald's second novel. This novel, The Beautiful and Damned,
was published two years later, and tells the story of a handsome young man and his beautiful
wife, who gradually deteriorate into careworn middle age while they wait for the young man to
inherit a large fortune. In a predictable ironic twist, they only receive their inheritance when it is
too late.
To escape this grim fate, the Fitzgeralds (together with their daughter, Frances, who was born in
1921) moved in 1924 to the Riviera, where they became part of a group of wealthy American
expatriates whose style was largely determined by Gerald and Sara Murphy. Fitzgerald described
this society in his last completed novel, Tender is the Night, and modeled its hero on Gerald
Murphy. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald's reputation as a heavy drinker tarnished his reputation in the
literary world; he was viewed as an irresponsible writer despite his painstaking revisions
numerous drafts of his work.
Shortly after their relocation to France, Fitzgerald completed his most famous and respected
novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). Fitzgerald's own divided nature can be seen in the contrast
between the novel's hero, Jay Gatsby, and its narrator, Nick Carraway. The former represents the
naive Midwesterner dazzled by the possibilities of the American dream; the latter represents the
compassionate Princeton gentleman who cannot help but regard that dream with suspicion. The
Great Gatsby may be described as the most profoundly American novel of its time; Fitzgerald
connects Gatsby's dream, his "Platonic conception of himself," with the aspirations of the
founders of America.
A year later, Fitzgerald published a collection of short stories, All the Sad Young Men. This book
marks the end of the most productive period of Fitzgerald's life; the next decade was full of
chaos and misery. Fitzgerald began to drink excessively, and Zelda began a slow descent into
madness. In 1930, she suffered her first mental breakdown. Her second breakdown, from which
she never fully recovered, came in 1932.
Throughout the 1930s the Fitzgeralds fought an ultimately unsuccessful battle to save their
marriage. This struggle was tremendously debilitating for Fitzgerald; he later said that he "left
[his] capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium." He did not finish his
next novel, Tender is the Night, until 1934. It is the story of a psychiatrist who marries one of his
patients, and, as she slowly recovers, she exhausts his vitality until he is "a man used up." This
book, the last that Fitzgerald ever completed, was considered technically faulty and was
commercially unsuccessful. It has since gained a reputation, however, as Fitzgerald's most
moving work.
Crushed by the failure of Tender is the Night and his despair over Zelda, Fitzgerald became an
incurable alcoholic. In 1937, however, he managed to acquire work as a script-writer in
Hollywood. There he met and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a famous Hollywood gossip
columnist. For the rest of his life, though he frequently had drunken spells in which he became
bitter and violent, Fitzgerald lived quietly with Ms. Graham. Occasionally he went east to visit
Zelda or his daughter Frances, who entered Vassar College in 1938.
In October 1939, Fitzgerald began a novel about Hollywood titled The Last Tycoon. The career
of its hero, Monroe Stahr, is based on that of the renowned Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg.
On December 21, 1940, Fitzgerald suffered a fatal heart attack, leaving the novel unfinished.
Even in its half-completed state, The Last Tycoon is considered the equal of the rest of
Fitzgerald's work for its intensity.
Many of his short stories allowed Fitzgerald to explore ideas and situations which were later
reworked in to his longer fiction. Descriptions of setting which were devised in Fitzgerald's 1922
story "Winter Dreams" became part of the detail of Daisy's home in The Great Gatsby. Similarly,
Fitzgerald also used inspirations from his 1927 story "Jacob's Ladder" as character ideas
for Tender Is the Night.
Fitzgerald often rejected his short fiction as 'trash', saying that the stories he wrote were merely
to fund the Fitzgerald's lavish lifestyle. His stories were indeed enough to sustain the Fitzgerald
family - his highest single story fee was $4000. The stories were far from trash, however, and
have been reproduced in collections many times. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was
made in to a feature film in 2008.
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Gatsby and Daisy are briefly happy together, and Nick gets drawn into their romance, even
though the outlook for the couple’s future seems hopeless, largely because of Gatsby’s inability
to separate his dreams from reality. Both the reader and Nick can see the disparity between
Gatsby’s idealized image of the Daisy he knew five years earlier, and the actual character of
Daisy herself. Fitzgerald presents Daisy as a shallow, materialistic character, reinforcing the
sense that Gatsby is chasing a dream, rather than a real person: “There must have been moments
even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams… it had gone beyond her, beyond
everything.” On an outing into the city, Gatsby erupts and tells everyone in the room that he and
Daisy are in love and are going to run away together to marry. However, Tom says Daisy will
never leave him, and Daisy is unable to tell Tom she never loved him. Here, for the first time,
Gatsby must confront directly the possibility that his dream cannot be attained, and see Daisy as
she currently is, rather than his idealized remembrance of her. Even at this point, however, he
remains convinced she will ultimately choose him over Tom.
The climax of the novel comes when the group is driving back from New York in two cars, and
Myrtle, Tom’s lover, mistakes Gatsby’s car for Tom’s and runs out into the street and is hit and
killed. The car that kills Myrtle belongs to Gatsby, but Daisy is driving. After this, the action
resolves quickly. Gatsby takes the blame in order to protect Daisy, and Myrtle’s husband,
George, kills Gatsby (and then himself) as revenge. Gatsby has already died a symbolic death at
this point, when he realizes that Daisy will not call him and is not going to run away with him
after all. His dream is at last obliterated, and he heads into the morning of his death facing reality
for the first time. Nick describes the world as Gatsby now sees it as unbearably ugly: “he found
what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”
In contrast to the previous obsession with the past, the final passages of Gatsby’s life are
concerned with newness, creation, and the future – one which, lacking his dream of Daisy, he
finds hideous.
In the final falling action the book, Nick must also confront reality, as he realizes his glamorous,
enigmatic neighbor was the poor son of farmers who got mixed up in criminal activities and had
no true friends besides Nick. Nick tries to arrange a funeral for Gatsby, but none of the guests
from his lavish parties come. Daisy and Tom leave town, and Nick is left alone with Gatsby’s
father, who reveals the truth of his son’s humble beginnings as “James Gatz.” After the funeral
Nick decides to return to the Midwest, where he is from, feeling disgusted by the “distortions” of
the East. First, though, he visits Gatsby’s house one last time, boarded up and already defaced
with graffiti, and reflects on the power of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock that kindled
Gatsby hope of recapturing the past up until the moment of his death. “So we beat on, boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” he says, including himself in the
tragedy of Gatsby’s fall.
Protagonist
Although Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby, and we only see things he
witnesses or is told about, Jay Gatsby is the protagonist of the novel. In addition to lending his
name to the book’s title, Gatsby also serves as the novel’s focal point. Gatsby’s quest to win
back Daisy incites all the action of the book, as well as the tragic conclusion. Unlike Nick, who
seems to not know what he wants, or else to not want more than to be an observer, Gatsby is
clear and determined about his goal. From the moment he first kissed Daisy, Gatsby has aspired
to attain her. This aspiration drives all his subsequent choices, and those choices in turn affect the
other characters in the novel. Mildred’s death, George’s suicide, and Gatsby’s murder are all the
result of Gatsby’s quest to have Daisy for himself. Tom, Daisy, and Nick’s decisions to leave the
east are also caused by Gatsby’s actions. Despite his power to change his life and the lives of
others, Gatsby fails to attain his goal. He dies without having won Daisy back from Tom. In fact,
we can infer that Gatsby’s presence in their lives served to draw the couple closer together – the
exact opposite of what Gatsby wanted.
Antagonist
Tom Buchanan is the main antagonist in The Great Gatsby. An aggressive and physically
imposing man, Tom represents the biggest obstacle standing between Gatsby and Daisy’s
reunion. For much of the novel Tom exists only as an idea in Gatsby’s mind. In fact, the reader
meets Tom long before Gatsby does, and understands that Tom will not back down from Daisy
gracefully. Tom’s own adultery would seem to make it easier for Gatsby to steal Daisy away, but
Tom maintains a strong need to keep order among his possessions—including his women. Tom
is also deeply invested in maintaining the social order. He feels threatened by the idea of the
lower classes encroaching on his privileged life. He objects to Gatsby not only because Gatsby is
in love with Daisy, but also because Gatsby comes from a poor background. When he says Daisy
wouldn’t leave him “for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger,”
he implies that he’d understand Daisy leaving him for another wealthy man, but can’t accept her
betraying him with someone of lower status. Tom’s antagonism, then, is not just an attempt to
thwart Gatsby in his specific quest, but to fight against class mobility in general.
While Tom most clearly stands in the way of Gatsby’s love for Daisy, Daisy herself functions as
an antagonist as well. Years prior to the events of the novel, when Gatsby left to join the war
effort, Daisy decided to give up on her love for Gatsby and run with a fast and rich crowd. Her
decision to marry Tom widened the social gap between Daisy and Gatsby, thwarting Gatsby in
his quest to be with her. Even once Tom learns about Daisy and Gatsby’s affair, Daisy prevents
Gatsby from attaining his goal of being with her when she refuses to say she never loved Tom.
Like Tom, Daisy is deeply attached to her upper class lifestyle. After the accident, even though
Gatsby takes responsibility for Myrtle’s death, Daisy once again chooses Tom over Gatsby. All
that Gatsby wants is Daisy, but Daisy repeatedly prevents him from attaining this goal of
possessing her completely. Even though she loves him, Daisy plays a crucial role in Gatsby’s
downfall.
Daisy’s passive role in Gatsby’s death signals a broader, more abstract antagonist that also
haunts the novel: the American Dream of upward mobility. All of the characters in the book—
even Nick, as he discloses in the opening pages—seek financial improvement in the hopes of
securing a better life. Yet none of these characters achieves anything like happiness. Nick is the
book’s most astute commentator on the illusory nature of the American Dream. On the novel’s
final page, Nick specifically addresses what he considers the elusive nature of the American
Dream. Even though hopeful dreaming like Gatsby’s seems to be oriented toward the future,
Nick claims that such dreaming is stuck in the past. More specifically, he argues that the
American Dream hearkens back to the time before America was even born, when it existed
purely as an idea in some Dutch sailors’ minds. Nick’s point is that reality always falls short of
the dream, and so striving to stay in the dream can just as easily lead one into a nightmare.
Setting
The action of The Great Gatsby takes place along a corridor stretching from New York City to
the suburbs known as West and East Egg. West and East Egg serve as stand-ins for the real life
locations of two peninsulas along the northern shore of Long Island. Midway between the Eggs
and Manhattan lies the “valley of ashes,” where Myrtle and George Wilson have a run-down
garage. This corridor between New York and the suburbs encompasses the full range of social
class. Whereas the valley of ashes is a place of evident poverty, both the city and the two suburbs
represent bastions of affluence. Nick describes the profound optimism he feels when arriving in
the city by train: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first
time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” He goes on to
assert, “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge.” Yet for all that New York
appears full of possibility, Nick often finds his actual experience there sad, as when, in Chapter
3, he observes “young clerks . . . wasting the most poignant moments of the night and life.”
While both East and West Egg are wealthy communities, families with inherited wealth, or “old
money,” live in the more fashionable East Egg. In West Egg, by contrast, residents whose wealth
is new, like Gatsby, conspicuously mimic European aristocracy to appear established. Gatsby’s
house is modeled on the Hotel de Ville (French for city hall) in Normandy, France, and was built
by a brewer who offered to pay the neighbors to live in thatched cottages, like peasants. While
many of the descriptions of the houses in the novel seem over the top, they are in fact based on
real mansions that existed on Long Island in the 1920s. For example, an estate named Harbor
Hill was also modeled on Hotels de Ville, and included farms, a blacksmith, a casino, and
Turkish baths on its 650 acres. Despite such opulent displays of wealth, the novel suggests that
the city, the suburbs, and the valley of ashes all share a sense of spiritual desolation and
psychological desperation. In the end, then, it seems to matter little where the characters find
themselves along the corridor between New York and the twin Eggs. Nobody in The Great
Gatsby is happy about their lot in life.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s
major themes.
Geography
Throughout the novel, places and settings epitomize the various aspects of the 1920s American
society that Fitzgerald depicts. East Egg represents the old aristocracy, West Egg the newly rich,
the valley of ashes the moral and social decay of America, and New York City the uninhibited,
amoral quest for money and pleasure. Additionally, the East is connected to the moral decay and
social cynicism of New York, while the West (including Midwestern and northern areas such as
Minnesota) is connected to more traditional social values and ideals. Nick’s analysis in Chapter 9
of the story he has related reveals his sensitivity to this dichotomy: though it is set in the East, the
story is really one of the West, as it tells how people originally from west of the Appalachians
(as all of the main characters are) react to the pace and style of life on the East Coast.
Weather
As in much of Shakespeare’s work, the weather in The Great Gatsby unfailingly matches the
emotional and narrative tone of the story. Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion begins amid a pouring
rain, proving awkward and melancholy; their love reawakens just as the sun begins to come out.
Gatsby’s climactic confrontation with Tom occurs on the hottest day of the summer, under the
scorching sun (like the fatal encounter between Mercutio and Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet).
Wilson kills Gatsby on the first day of autumn, as Gatsby floats in his pool despite a palpable
chill in the air—a symbolic attempt to stop time and restore his relationship with Daisy to the
way it was five years before, in 1917.
Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Genre
Tragedy, Realism, Modernism, Social Satire
Tragedy
The Great Gatsby can be considered a tragedy in that it revolves around a larger-than-life hero
whose pursuit of an impossible goal blinds him to reality and leads to his violent death.
According to the classical definition of tragedy, the hero possesses a tragic flaw that compels
him to reach for something or attempt something that precipitates a disastrous result. Writers
employ the conventions of tragedy to explore characters’ relationship to fate and free will, and
provide a catharsis, or emotional release, in audiences. Gatsby’s tragic flaw is his inability to
wake up from his dream of the past and accept reality. His obsession with recapturing his past
relationship with Daisy compels him to a life of crime and deceit. He becomes a bootlegger, does
business with a gangster, and creates a false identity. He is rumored to have killed a man. He
briefly attains his goal of being reunited with the object of his obsession, but willfully blinds
himself to the reality of the situation: that Daisy is no longer the young woman he fell in love
with in Louisville. Rather, she is a married mother with no real intention of leaving her husband.
While Gatsby’s criminal behavior is self-destructive, his tragic refusal to see reality ultimately
leads to his death.
Despite telling the story of Gatsby’s downfall, Nick does not present him as a particularly dark
character, instead expressing admiration for Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope” and
“romantic readiness.” But Gatsby’s romantic hopefulness functions as a flaw, rather than a
virtue. It leads him to crime, violence, and ultimately a form of suicide, when he takes the blame
for Myrtle’s death. One could argue that the rigidity of the American class system means Gatsby
is fated to fail to achieve his dream, an example of tragedy being determined by fate. Another
interpretation is that Gatsby willfully chooses his dream over reality, a counter example of
tragedy being impelled by free will. Nick suggests this interpretation when he says, about
Gatsby’s last moments, “he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price
for living too long with a single dream.” Either way, Gatsby’s inherent flaw leads to his ruin and
the death of several characters, as in the classic definition of tragedy.
Realism
The Great Gatsby is an example of literary realism because it depicts the world as it really is.
Realist novels employ geographically precise settings and locations, factual historic events, and
accurate descriptions of social systems to reflect and implicitly critique contemporary society.
Realist writers strive to reflect a world the reader recognizes, and provide insight into how
human nature functions in this reality. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s characters move
through Manhattan landmarks such as the Plaza Hotel, Pennsylvania Station, and Central Park.
East and West Egg are recognizable as fictionalized versions of the real towns of East and West
Hampton. References to the First World War and Prohibition situate the novel in a specific time
and place. The great economic disparity of the early 1920s, presented in the contrast between
Gatsby’s extravagant parties and the destitute families living in the valley of ashes, also
realistically portray the social order of the novel’s time. Fitzgerald’s frank acknowledgement of
sex, adultery, and divorce further ground the plot in reality.
Modernism
The Great Gatsby is also an example of modernism, a literary and artistic movement that reacted
against the romantic, often sentimental novels and art of the Victorian period, and reached its
height during and after World War I. Modernist writers were concerned with the individual’s
experience in a rapidly industrializing society, and rallied to modernist poet Ezra Pound’s
declaration “Make it new!” Fitzgerald, who was part of the same group as Pound, said his goal
for The Great Gatsby was to write “something new.” In the novel, the encroachment of
modernity is seen in the descriptions of the valley of ashes, as well as the “red-belted ocean-
going ships,” trains, and most of all, automobiles. The sardonic descriptions of the latest
innovations, such as “a machine which could extract the juice…of two hundred oranges…if a
little button was pressed two hundred times,” implies a certain amount of anxiety about the
increasing automation of everyday life. Fitzgerald portrays both the exhilaration of urban
landscapes – “the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to
the restless eye” – and the lonely anonymity of workers in the “white chasms” of the city. But in
other aspects Fitzgerald deviates from modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and James
Joyce. Their novels Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses both follow one or two characters over the
course of a single day, and are narrated in a stream of consciousness style of interior monologue,
while Gatsby has a more traditional plot and narrative style.
Social Satire
Fitzgerald’s use of irony, exaggeration, and ridicule to mock hypocritical social types also
qualifies The Great Gatsby as a social satire. Characters in social satires are frequently
unsympathetic, functioning as emblems of social problems in order to highlight inequality and
injustice. In Gatsby, many of the minor characters serve as symbols of the mindless excess and
superficiality of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald catalogues the many guests at Gatsby’s parties with
humorous disdain: the three Mr. Mumbles, the man in the library who is shocked to discover the
books on the shelves are real, the group who “flipped their noses up like goats at whosoever
came near,” the girls whose last names were “either the melodious names of flowers… or the
sterner ones of the great American capitalists.” Fitzgerald satirizes capitalism in general with the
figure of the man selling puppies outside the train station who bears “an absurd resemblance to
John D. Rockefeller.” By comparing a powerful tycoon to a street vendor, Fitzgerald satirizes the
self-importance of the American ruling class.
But while some social satire retains a superficial tone throughout, The Great Gatsby goes deeper
into human fallibility. The tragedy at the book’s end, in which Myrtle Wilson, Gatsby, and
George Wilson all die in quick succession, is treated without humor. This chain of events
illustrates the heartlessness of the characters involved, but also reveals Gatsby’s humanity, and
treats him as a character worthy of the reader’s sympathy after Daisy abandons him. Nick’s
comment that Gatsby is “better than the whole damn bunch put together,” and his loyalty after
Gatsby is killed suggests that Gatsby’s death has true consequence. This solemn tone contrasts
with the lighter, more satiric tone of the book’s beginning. Satire is often limited in its ability to
engage emotions of sadness, sympathy, and melancholy, and Fitzgerald uses a more serious tone
to communicate these emotions. He expands his main characters, especially Nick and Gatsby,
beyond caricature into fully realized, believable individuals.
Allusions
Chapter I
Mythological/Historical
I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in
red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and
Morgan and Mæcenas knew.
This quote contains several allusions: The name Midas is an allusion to the Greek god Midas,
who turned everything he touched to gold, and “Morgan and Mæcenas” are allusions to the
financier J. P. Morgan and the wealthy Roman patron Mæcenas.
Literary
They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact
end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly
overhead.
This is an allusion to the story in which Christopher Columbus flattened the end of an egg to get
it to stand on its own.
Chapter II
Historical/Political
Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s where all his money comes from.
This is an allusion to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and the King of Prussia, who
abdicated right before the end of World War I.
Chapter III
Historical/Political
The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York
are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary
colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile.
Pop Culture
Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for
courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush;
the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous
news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies.
These are allusions to the jazz dancer Joe Frisco, the actress and dancer Gilda Gray, and the
theatre revue the Ziegfeld Follies.
Historical
Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the
‘Stoddard Lectures.’
This is an allusion to the American writer John Stoddard, who wrote accounts of his travels
throughout the world.
Historical
It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco.
Chapter IV
Historical
One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin
to the devil.
This is an allusion to Paul von Hindenburg, a German general during World War I and eventual
president of Germany.
Historical
Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed
the World’s Series back in 1919.
This is an allusion to the incident in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox
intentionally lost the World Series in exchange for money, an undertaking actually organized by
Arnold Rothstein.
Chapter V
Historical
‘Your place looks like the World’s Fair,’ I said.
This is an allusion to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the first to be powered by electricity.
Literary
Gatsby looked with vacant eyes through a copy of Clay’s “Economics,” staring at the Finnish tread that
shook the kitchen floor, and peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of
invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside.
Literary
That’s the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour.
This is an allusion to Maria Edgeworth’s 1800 novel Castle Rackrent, in which the ending is a
mystery to readers.
Historical
There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like
Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour.
This is an allusion to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who would gaze at a church
steeple while deep in thought.
Historical
And inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music-rooms and Restoration salons, I felt that
there were guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we
had passed through.
This is an allusion to the last queen of France, Marie Antoinette, who was known for her
expensive taste.
Chapter VI
Historical
The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.
Chapter VII
Literary
It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one
Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.
This is an allusion to the ancient Roman satire Trimalchio, written by Petronius, in which the
title character is a former slave who dresses up as a rich man.
Chapter VIII
Religious
He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but now he found that he had committed
himself to the following of a grail.
This is an allusion to the grail from which Jesus was said to have drunk at the Last Supper, which
has been the subject of many failed quests throughout history and literature.
Style
The style of The Great Gatsby is wry, sophisticated, and elegiac, employing extended metaphors,
figurative imagery, and poetic language to create a sense of nostalgia and loss. The book can be
read as an extended elegy, or poetic lament, for Gatsby – “the man who gives his name to this
book… who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.” Throughout the novel
Nick references the fact that he is creating a written account of a time past – one he remembers
with nostalgia and fondness. One of the most frequently occurring words in the book is ‘time,’
and the word ‘past’ appears often, as well, suggesting the act of remembrance and recollection.
Fitzgerald describes Gatsby as an exceptionally graceful, stylish, and elegant character, and the
novel’s flowing, musical sentences underscore this impression. When talking about other
characters, however, the elevated, metaphoric language often creates ironic contrast with the
crude nature of the characters themselves. Many of his descriptions contain an undertone of
ridicule, with the most sympathetic, wistful passages reserved for the character of Gatsby and for
Nick’s lost innocence.
While an elegy is often written in a reverential style, Fitzgerald undercuts the sense of mourning
in Gatsby with sharp, sardonic wit. Nick’s narration of Gatsby’s parties and Long Island society
contains many subtly satiric observations. “Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a
dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the
countryside—East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its
spectroscopic gayety.” The ornate words “homogeneity” and “spectroscopic” point toward
Nick’s high level of education and suggest that the novel speaks to a highly educated reader. In
describing the relationship between East and West Egg as “condescending” and “on guard,”
Fitzgerald also imbues the passage with a sense of elitism. Nick’s rarified tone is juxtaposed
against the behavior of the guests themselves, who grow increasingly less sophisticated as the
party wears on and the Champagne flows. By the end of the evening, the last guests are nearly
incoherent – “wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?” – their inelegant speech
thrown into relief against the elegance of Nick’s description of the party.
The sophisticated style is also indicated by the extended metaphors and elaborate imagery that
characterize the novel. For example, in the description of the same party, Nick observes: “The
groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath;
already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and
more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with
triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly
changing light.” Held together by semicolons and conjunctions, this lengthy descriptive sentence
gives the reader a vivid vision of the scene. We get a strong sense of continual movement
(“dissolve and form,” “wanderers,” “glide on,” “constantly changing”), much like a dance,
implying that the partygoers are accustomed to moving effortlessly through life. The passage
also includes a subtle extended metaphor of the ocean (“swell,” “dissolve and form,” “sea-
change”), adding to the sense of ceaseless motion.
Fitzgerald uses rhetorical devices such as alliteration and repetition to contribute to the text’s
evocative mood. For example, when Gatsby and Tom visit Myrtle in the city, Nick imagines
someone looking up at them illuminated in a window, saying: “Yet high over the city our line of
yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the
darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without,
simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” The list of contrasts
(“within” and “without,” “enchanted” and “repelled”) illustrate Nick’s restlessness and
fascination with the city. Even the most casual observations are highly stylized, often more
poetic than literal, like Nick’s description of an enraged wife who appears “like an angry
diamond,” or the city “rising up out of the river in white heaps and sugar lumps.” These
metaphoric descriptions are contrasted with the vernacular speech of many of the lower class
characters, such as the Wilsons. “I just got wised up to something funny… that’s why I been
bothering you about the car,” Mr. Wilson tells Tom. Whereas some other writers of the time
period, such as Ernest Hemingway, preferred to use simple language, Fitzgerald delights in the
poetic capacities of his prose, and in juxtaposing elevated, imagistic language with the rough
voices and brutish nature of many of his characters.
Point of View
The Great Gatsby is written in first-person limited perspective from Nick’s point of view. This
means that Nick uses the word “I” and describes events as he experienced them. He does not
know what other characters are thinking unless they tell him. Although Nick narrates the book,
in many ways he is incidental to the events involved, except that he facilitates the meeting of
Daisy and Gatsby. For the most part, he remains an observer of the events around him,
disappearing into the background when it comes time to narrate crucial meetings between
Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy. In several extended passages his voice disappears completely, and he
relates thoughts and feelings of other characters as though he is inside their heads. When Gatsby
tells Nick about his past with Daisy, Nick writes directly from Gatsby’s point of vie “His heart
beat faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl… his
mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited…” These passages are
presented as recollections Gatsby has told Nick, so they don’t violate the first-person narration.
Whenever a novel is narrated in the first person by one of the characters, a key question for the
reader is how much faith we should put in the narrator’s reliability. When a story is told from
one person’s perspective, the narrator will almost always be unreliable in some way, simply
because the narrator brings his or her own biases to bear on the situation. Some narrators
deliberately lie to the reader. We call these narrators, or any narrator whose words can largely
not be trusted, “unreliable narrators.” Nick Carraway is not a classically unreliable narrator,
because Fitzgerald gives no indications that Nick is lying to the reader or that his version of
events directly contradicts anyone else’s. He apparently tries to be as truthful as possible. He
tells us right away that he has an uncanny ability to reserve judgment and get people to trust him,
which encourages us to see him as a reliable narrator. At the same time, he also says “I am one of
the few honest people I have ever known.” His very need to describe himself this way makes the
reader question how much Nick can actually be trusted.
Nick is also unreliable because of his fondness for Gatsby, which affects his view of the story
and is contrasted by his clear distaste for the other characters in the book. He sees Gatsby as a
symbol of hope, which makes his perspective biased and occasionally makes us question his
representation of Gatsby or Daisy as characters. Nick’s bias becomes clear in the earliest pages
of the book, when he tells us that “there was something gorgeous about him [Gatsby], some
heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” We are inclined to see Gatsby as a sensitive
genius and to side with him in the romantic triangle between Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom. The less
appealing aspects of Gatsby’s character – the fact that he is involved in adultery, or that his
wealth comes from unsavory sources, and he may be mixed up in organized crime – are justified
as the romantic lengths to which he’ll go to be reunited with Daisy. Nick feels contempt for
Tom, and, to a lesser degree, Daisy, and his personal feelings for the characters similarly color
his presentation of events.
Tone
The tone of The Great Gatsby veers between scornful and sympathetic, with caustic scorn
gradually giving way to melancholic sympathy toward the end. The tone of the opening
paragraphs of the novel is also melancholic because Nick narrates these paragraphs from a later
perspective, as part of the framing of the narrative. Once he’s established his framing device,
Nick becomes wry and satiric in describing the Long Island social scene. Nick is both impressed
and disturbed by his neighbors’ hedonistic lifestyles. He extensively details the decadence of
Gatsby’s extravagant parties, and comments on Tom and Daisy in a tone of aloof reproach.
When Nick finds out about Tom’s affair with Myrtle, he says, “To a certain temperament the
situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the
police.” He does not actually phone the police, or even tell Daisy about the affair, preferring to
remain passive and confine his concerns to critical observations. He continues to visit Daisy,
Tom, and Gatsby and enjoy their benevolence. In these opening chapters the tone remains coolly
bemused by the excesses and romantic entanglements of others.
As the book proceeds, and Nick becomes friendly with Gatsby, he gets drawn into the love
triangle between Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby, and the tone becomes both more emotional and more
melancholy. Nick is less sardonic, and more earnest in his storytelling. His tone becomes
sympathetic, even admiring, as he gets to know Gatsby as a person and understand the source of
his obsession with Daisy. The tone then becomes even more intimate, as Nick starts to identify
with Gatsby: “Through all he said… I was reminded of something – an elusive rhythm, a
fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.” In the famous final line of
the book, the extent of this melancholic tone reaches its climax as Nick concludes, “So we beat
on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Here, the tone is one of
complete identification as Nick includes himself (and the reader) as susceptible to the pull of the
past. The alliteration of “b” sounds reinforces this impression of circularity and makes us further
feel the pain and helplessness of the characters.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a significant technique in The Great Gatsby. From the book’s opening pages,
Fitzgerald hints at the book’s tragic end, with the mysterious reference to the “foul dust that
floated in the wake of (Gatsby’s) dreams.” Fitzgerald also employs false foreshadowing, setting
up expectations for one thing to happen, such as saying “Gatsby turned out all right at the end,”
then reversing it. Throughout the novel, foreshadowing enforces the sense of tragic inevitability
to events, as though all the characters are doomed to play out their fates. The use of
foreshadowing heightens the sense that no character can escape his or her predetermined role in
life.
Daisy’s unattainability
The first time we (and Nick) see Gatsby, he is standing with his arms outstretched, “trembling,”
reaching for the green light, which Fitzgerald describes as insubstantial – it is “minute and far
away,” and “might have been the end of a dock.” In this way he suggests that Gatsby’s quest is
toward something ephemeral. When Nick looks again, Gatsby has disappeared into the “unquiet
darkness” – foreshadowing his disappearance into death at the end of the book. The
inaccessibility of the green light tells us to expect a narrative in which the object of desire will
never be obtained. Despite being reunited with Daisy, Gatsby is unable to fully attain her, just as
the green light will never come closer to his grasp.
Another subtle instance of foreshadowing comes when Tom takes Nick to Myrtle’s apartment
and the reader comes to understand Tom’s attachment to Daisy. After Myrtle enrages Tom by
repeating Daisy’s name, Tom hits her and breaks her nose. This attack reveals Tom’s brutal
nature and pinpoints the relationship between Myrtle and Tom as a stressor for the story. When
Myrtle’s sister tells Nick that Daisy won’t divorce Tom because she’s Catholic, Nick is “shocked
at the elaborateness of the lie,” suggesting Daisy and Tom are more enmeshed than Myrtle
knows. This revelation foreshadows Daisy’s later refusal to say she never loved Tom. The
passage also sets up the scene after Myrtle is killed, when Nick sees Daisy and Tom together and
remarks on the “unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the couple.” Daisy’s manslaughter of
Myrtle is the resolution of the foreshadowing of both violence and the strength of the bond
between Tom and Daisy in the party scene. The surprising element is that Daisy, not Tom, kills
Myrtle, which reverses our expectations. In this way, Fitzgerald manipulates foreshadowing in
order to surprise the reader.
Gatsby’s fate
In a more misleading instance of foreshadowing, Nick implies that Gatsby will have a happy
ending; only after the reader has finished the book does the true meaning of Nick’s words
become clear. In the opening pages Nick says that “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.” The reader may take
the first proclamation as proof that Gatsby survives the story or ends up with Daisy, but in fact
Gatsby dies at the end of the novel. The red herring increases the reader’s surprise when this
occurs. Upon re-reading the passage, we understand another meaning of the phrase, which is that
Gatsby turns out to be a hero rather than a villain of the story. In the second part of the quotation
Nick tells us that the story will end sorrowfully and will have a lasting negative impact on him;
this also turns out to be true.
Myrtle’s death in a hit-and-run car accident is both directly and indirectly foreshadowed.
Automobiles are a preoccupation of the novel, with many references to cars and driving. Early in
the book, Nick leaves Gatsby’s party and sees a car in a ditch, “violently shorn of one wheel,” an
image echoed later by the sight of Mytle’s “left breast swinging loose like a flap” after she is hit
by the car. Next, Jordan nearly runs over a workman with her car, then tells Nick she’s not
concerned about being a careless driver because, “it takes two to make an accident.” These
scenes foreshadow the scene when Daisy hits Myrtle, who has run out into the road – an accident
caused by both Daisy and Myrtle’s carelessness. Direct foreshadowing appears near the end of
the book, when Nick and Tom and Jordan leave New York. Nick has just realized it’s his
birthday; he is thirty, and the years ahead of him promise only “a thinning briefcase of
enthusiasm, thinning hair.” Nick is suddenly aware of his own mortality, so when he says, “we
drove on toward death through the cooling twilight,” the sentence can be read as a general
reference to mortality. But in fact the line is a specific foreshadowing of Myrtle’s death, which
will happen soon down the road.
Key Facts
Full Title The Great Gatsby
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald
Type Of Work Novel
Genre Tragedy, Realism, Modernism, Social Satire
Language English
Time And Place Written 1923–1924, America and France
Date Of First Publication 1925
Publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons
Narrator Nick Carraway; Carraway not only narrates the story but implies that he is the book’s
author
Point Of View Nick Carraway narrates in both first and third person, presenting only what he
himself observes. Nick alternates sections where he presents events objectively, as they appeared
to him at the time, with sections where he gives his own interpretations of the story’s meaning
and of the motivations of the other characters.
Tone Nick’s attitudes toward Gatsby and Gatsby’s story are ambivalent and contradictory. At
times he seems to disapprove of Gatsby’s excesses and breaches of manners and ethics, but he
also romanticizes and admires Gatsby, describing the events of the novel in a nostalgic and
elegiac tone.
Tense Past
Setting (Time) Summer 1922
Settings (Place) Long Island and New York City
Protagonist Gatsby and/or Nick
Major Conflict Gatsby has amassed a vast fortune in order to win the affections of the upper-
class Daisy Buchanan, but his mysterious past stands in the way of his being accepted by her.
Rising Action Gatsby’s lavish parties, Gatsby’s arrangement of a meeting with Daisy at Nick’s
Climax There are two possible climaxes: Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy in Chapters 5–6; the
confrontation between Gatsby and Tom in the Plaza Hotel in Chapter 7.
Falling Action Daisy’s rejection of Gatsby, Myrtle’s death, Gatsby’s murder
Themes The decline of the American dream, the spirit of the 1920s, the difference between
social classes, the role of symbols in the human conception of meaning, the role of the past in
dreams of the future
Motifs The connection between events and weather, the connection between geographical
location and social values, images of time, extravagant parties, the quest for wealth
Symbols The green light on Daisy’s dock, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, the valley of
ashes, Gatsby’s parties, East Egg, West Egg
Foreshadowing Dasiy’s unattainability, Tom’s relationship with Myrtle, Gatsby’s fate, and
Myrtle’s hit-and-run death.
One of the most memorable images in The Great Gatsby is the green light that Gatsby watches
across the water, which simultaneously symbolizes Gatsby’s love for Daisy, money, and the
American Dream. We first see the green light at the end of Chapter 1, before Nick has even met
Gatsby, and immediately understand it as an elusive and powerful object that has great symbolic
meaning for Gatsby. Because the green light hangs at the end of Daisy’s dock, and Gatsby
bought his house in order to be able to see it each night, the green light most obviously
symbolizes his unwavering love for Daisy. When Gatsby reveals his knowledge of the green
light to Daisy after their reunion, Nick observes, “Possibly it had occurred to him that the
colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever…His count of enchanted objects had
diminished by one.” For Gatsby, the green light proved that he and Daisy existed in the same
world and suggested the possibility that they might someday meet again. In a sense, the symbol
is more important to Gatsby than what is being symbolized, and Gatsby will struggle, and fail, to
reconcile his dream with reality over the rest of the book.
The color green is traditionally associated with money, and the green light also symbolizes the
wealth that Gatsby believes will enable him to win Daisy back from Tom. But Gatsby is
discounting the important distinction between wealth and class made by other characters in the
novel. Through his illegal activities Gatsby has acquired great wealth, but he is still shut out of
the upper classes by those born into wealth, like Tom and Daisy. While green is the color of
money due to its association with American paper currency, it’s interesting to note that Daisy is
associated with gold and silver, more stable, enduring forms of currency. Daisy is described as
“the golden girl,” and “gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”
In this sense, the green light represents the type of money that is available to someone like
Gatsby who is willing to do anything to attain it, while the inherited wealth of Daisy and Tom,
linked to their class status, remains out of reach.
In its largest sense, then, the green light represents the American Dream. The American Dream is
the idea that someone from a lower-class background can work hard and move up the social
ladder because American society has historically had more class mobility than other countries.
The novel explores whether the promise of the American Dream is actually true. On the surface,
Gatsby appears to have achieved the American Dream, because he has managed to move from a
lower-class background into the highest echelons of New York society, entirely through his own
self-invention. In reality, though,Gatsby illustrates the hollowness of the American Dream,
because even once he has accomplished this goal, he still is unable to attain Daisy, who
represents a traditional elite background. Tom consistently mocks Gatsby for his humble
beginnings, calling him a “common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on (Daisy’s)
finger.” This not only implies that the American Dream is ultimately unfulfilling, but it also
suggests that despite the illusion of social mobility, people from the lower classes will never be
fully accepted by those who were born into wealth.
That the American Dream is as unattainable as the green light at the end of the dock is evidenced
by the aftermath of the car crash that serves as the climax of the novel. As a result of the crash,
the three characters from lower class backgrounds (Gatsby, Myrtle, and George) die, while the
upper class characters of Nick, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan survive. Tom and Daisy, who were born
into privilege, remain insulated from the negative consequences of their actions. Here,
Fitzgerald’s critique of the American Dream reaches its apex, as he implies that although
working-class people can circulate with the upper classes, they will ultimately be expendable
while the upper classes will carelessly maintain their own dominance. At the end of the novel,
Fitzgerald writes, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch
out our arms farther.” This description shows that the American Dream’s most important quality
is its inaccessibility: a dream is not a reality.
Context
Further Study Context
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his ancestor
Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald was raised in St. Paul,
Minnesota. Though an intelligent child, he did poorly in school and was sent to a New Jersey
boarding school in 1911. Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to enroll at
Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time at college,
and he never graduated, instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as World War I neared its end.
Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at Camp Sheridan, in Montgomery,
Alabama. There he met and fell in love with a wild seventeen-year-old beauty named Zelda
Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and
leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success. With the publication of This
Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and
fame to convince Zelda to marry him.
Many of these events from Fitzgerald’s early life appear in his most famous novel, The Great
Gatsby, published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is a thoughtful young man from
Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick’s case, Yale), who moves to New York
after the war. Also similar to Fitzgerald is Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man who idolizes
wealth and luxury and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a
military camp in the South.
Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless life-style of parties and
decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. Similarly, Gatsby
amasses a great deal of wealth at a relatively young age, and devotes himself to acquiring
possessions and throwing parties that he believes will enable him to win Daisy’s love. As the
giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression,
however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which
hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The
Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write
screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a
heart attack at the age of forty-four.
Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz
Age.” Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period,
in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the
nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth
Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers, and an
underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police
notice, and “speakeasies”—secret clubs that sold liquor—thrived. The chaos and violence of
World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to
wild and extravagant living to compensate. The staid conservatism and timeworn values of the
previous decade were turned on their ear, as money, opulence, and exuberance became the order
of the day.
Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting, and,
like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. Now he found himself in an era in which
unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, particularly in the large cities of the East. Even
so, like Nick, Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and
hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many ways, The Great
Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age.
Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he
wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised.
Gatsby and the Jazz Age
Further Study Gatsby and the Jazz Age
The Great Gatsby is set against the backdrop of 1920s New York City, a period known as the
“Roaring Twenties” for the exhilarating pace set by the rapidly evolving culture and technology.
It was a decade of tremendous wealth in the United States following the deprivations of the First
World War, and the upper-class characters of Gatsby exemplify the hedonism of the era.
Fitzgerald explores the major developments of the Roaring Twenties, including the birth of jazz,
the women’s suffrage movement, economic prosperity, and the rapid growth of Manhattan as a
cosmopolitan city. He mentions the many new technologies beginning to be popularized at the
time such as automobiles, radio, movies, as well as the growing influence of the financial
markets in New York. Several characters (including Gatsby and Nick) served in the war, an
unstable period that established the country as a global economic leader, and the characters’
unstinting embrace of luxury echo the country’s rampant appetite for consumer goods during the
period. But the novel doesn’t merely catalogue the times: Fitzgerald’s themes of ambition and
inequality reflect the instability of the era, which ended disastrously in the Great Depression. His
insight into what is often described as a period of superficial frivolity make the novel a lasting
emblem of the era.
The decade of the 1920s is also often called the Jazz Age, a time when musicians like Jelly Roll
Morton, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong brought jazz music to a mainstream audience. Jazz
musicians were almost always black, and their popularity carried complex political ramifications
because 1920s America was still highly segregated. Most of the United States lived under Jim
Crow, a series of laws and social codes that forced black Americans to live, work, and learn
separately from whites. The Great Gatsby reflects the racist attitudes and anxieties of the times.
The white, wealthy main characters listen to jazz music but do not socialize with black New
Yorkers, and, in a particularly troubling passage, Nick expresses derisive amazement to see a
fancy car with black passengers driven by a white chauffeur. Tom speaks admiringly of a book
called “The Rise of the Colored Empires,” a fictionalized version of a white supremacy tract
published in 1920. Jim Crow is not explicitly discussed in the novel, as for many white
Americans, it was an accepted state of affairs.
The 1920s witnessed some positive political changes for women, most significantly in the
passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Women were also
increasingly finding employment—a trend that would increase during World War II, when many
men left factories to go to war. The female characters in Gatsby interact differently with their
period’s gender norms. Daisy expresses disappointment that her child is a girl, saying her highest
hopes for her are that she’s a “beautiful little fool,” conveying how limited she thinks women’s
options are in the world. Jordan represents a more modern woman, an unmarried and childless
professional golf player, but she is criticized by the male characters for her independence, as
when Tom says, “they oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.”. Both these women
are extremely privileged, and the power they do have comes at least partly from their upper-class
status. Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, is the only working-class woman discussed at length, and she is
portrayed as dependent on her husband and her lover. Fitzgerald represents all three women as
ambitious but spoiled and foolish in different ways, and he does not show them engaging
actively with the political climate of suffrage.
The 1920s are also known as the heyday of Prohibition, a period when the production,
transportation, or sale of alcohol was banned following the passage of the 18th amendment.
While Prohibition aimed to rid the country of the social ills associated with alcohol consumption,
it mostly succeeded in forcing the distribution and sale of liquor underground. Illegal
manufacture and sale of alcohol—a crime known as bootlegging – spread across the country, and
created lucrative opportunities for organized crime syndicates, such as the mobsters Gatsby
associates with in his quest to gain wealth. Al Capone, a crime boss who allegedly made several
millions of dollars a year from his involvement in bootlegging, has been considered by some
critics as a model for Gatsby for the way he rose from humble beginnings to become extremely
wealthy. Prohibition grew increasingly unpopular during the Great Depression, when it was
perceived as limiting potential sources of labor and government revenue, and the 18th
amendment was repealed in 1933.
Fitzgerald presents conflicting ideas about the possibility of social change in America along lines
of race, gender, and class. Gatsby’s success shows that people in the 1920s could potentially gain
greater independence, rights, and self-empowerment, although The Great Gatsby offers no legal
models for class mobility, and Gatsby’s own ascension is a matter mostly of coincidence and
luck. Similarly, the upper classes appear insulated from downward mobility. Daisy and Tom,
born into the wealthy elite, suffer no losses at the end of the novel despite their criminal or
morally ambiguous actions. Only Gatsby, Myrtle, and George Wilson—the characters born into
poverty—who suffer. But for the modern reader, the specter of the impending Great Crash on
Wall Street hangs over the novel as a potential source of financial reckoning for the wealthy
characters. Tom, Daisy, and Jordan don’t know about the cataclysmic economic upheaval
awaiting them, just as Fitzgerald, writing the novel in 1925, couldn’t have predicted the Roaring
Twenties would come to grinding halt just four years later, as the intoxicating fizz of the Jazz
Age gave way to the bleak economic reality of the Great Depression.
Further Study
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald blends the intense symbolism and figurative language of
modernism with the social and psychological believability of realism. Realism was a literary
movement that originated in the mid-nineteenth century, and seeks to depict the world and
people as they really are. Realist writers employ specific details and psychologically complex,
believable characters to provide insight into human nature and society. They were reacting
against romanticism, a previous dominant nineteenth-century school of literary thought, which
portrays an idealized world characterized by intense emotion. Realist authors George Eliot,
Henry James, and Mark Twain set their novels in recognizable locations, incorporated acute
observations and meticulous detail, and were more interested in complex, flawed characters than
traditional archetypes. Their plots often prioritized characters’ emotional conflicts over dramatic
external events. While all realism, whether set in a country manor or on the Mississippi, contains
social commentary, social realism specifically critiques a social or political issue—for example,
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House satirizes the complicated legal system of Victorian England.
Modernism was a literary and artistic movement that began in the 1900s, as a response to the rise
in technology and urbanization in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Like realists, modernist
writers were interested in the individual, internal experience, and drew on theories of the
unconscious to mine their characters’ inner lives. But modernists were also interested in stylistic
experimentation, fashioning new literary forms to explore breakdowns in traditional modes of
communication and questioning the very nature of reality itself. Their work expressed concerns
about automation at the turn of the century, and, later, horror at the First World War and its
aftermath. Following the war, several American writers, including Fitzgerald, moved to Paris and
began meeting at the home of the poet Gertrude Stein. The writers of this so-called “Lost
Generation” strove to represent the struggle of the individual in the face of the chaos, anonymity,
and alienating effects of modernity. In Ulysses, James Joyce incorporated made-up words and
obscure references, representing the impossibility of truly understanding anything in the world.
Stream-of-consciousness, another non-traditional narrative form, was popularized by Virginia
Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and sought to replicate the continuous, unedited
nature of individual thought.
Because he was writing at the height of modernism and interacted with famous proponents of the
movement such as Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald is most often remembered as an American
modernist, and Gatsby has many modernist elements. At the end of the book Nick references the
artist El Greco, a 16th century painter who has been called “the first modernist” for the way his
paintings distorted figures and fractured color to investigate surface reality. Similarly, many
of Gatsby’s descriptions – “blue smoke,” a “grotesque” rose, “shining dust,” are poetic
distortions of reality. The characterization of automobiles, and technology in general, as
dangerous yet alluring also reflect modernist anxieties about automation. At the same
time, Gatsby does not fully belong to modernism because of its many realist attributes such as
setting, detail, and social commentary. Gatsby’s satiric portrayal of many characters critiques
American concepts of social mobility, and the novel on a whole can be read as an examination
into the false promise of the American Dream. Fitzgerald’s approach to character is more realist
than modernist in that he explores how characters function in their social milieu, rather than
concentrating entirely on the inner world of one or two protagonists. Ultimately, the novel
utilizes both styles in following modernist Ezra Pound’s dictate to “make it new.”