The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald

1. The American Dream

Positive Aspects Negative Aspects

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Materialism and consumerism.

A land of infinite opportunity.
Corruption as people pursued wealth.
Possibilities through courage and hard work.
Exclusion of the poor as the rich get richer.
Gatsby recreates himself, turning his back on
his humble beginnings. Gatsby gets his wealth by corrupt means.

2. The Social Scenario

The Jazz Age 1918-1929: The Prohibition

The end of WW 1 till the Great Depression
(Wall Street crash). All the pent-up nervous
energy of the post-war years found their
expression in this period which was like one
long party.
Alcohol was banned in America in 1920 it
could not be made or sold so there was lots
of smuggling or bootlegging. Police tried
to enforce impossible laws- liquor was sold in
speakeasies (like shebeens).

Jazz was popular probably echoing the new Organised crime thrived.
trends in the arts modernist movements in
music, art, literature. The ban ended in only in 1933!

Consumer culture a new modern trend. Gatsby is involved in some form of

bootlegging.
Traditional values started to disappear.

There was an increasing focus on the

individual, on pleasure and enjoyment. No
sign of the Wall Street crash yet.

Not everyone lives the high life Wilson

does not.

The Role of Women Technological Advances

Women now cut their hair in bobs- very The consumer society now has electricity and
short and wore short skirts. Legs, arms, knees telephones.
and ankles were exposed!!!! They were called
flappers Daisy is one and Myrtle tries to Lots of appliances e.g. fridges, dishwashers,
be one. toasters, juicers (like the one the Buchanans
butler uses) so there was more time for
They wore make-up! pleasure, leisure and entertainment.

No more stay-at-home housewives women

moved out into the world of men.

Womens vote obtained in 1920.

The position of women in the workplace was
still inferior to that of men no equal wages
in those days.

The Motor Car

A symbol of the consumer society.

Production lines and Fordism.

Production time reduced because of
these.

Lots of people living on credit.

Boosted the economy.

Symbols of status and wealth.

Chapter 1:

1.1 The two Eggs are twenty miles from New York, on Long Island Sound (a very busy
shipping lane). The East Egg was the fashionable place to live. Extremely wealthy
people like the Buchanans lived there. Their houses are the white palaces referred to
in the extract. The West Egg was less fashionable with some pretentious houses having
been built in imitation of fashionable European building styles. Nicks own house was a
weather-beaten cardboard bungalow with a view of Gatsbys lawn and the sea. He
calls it an eyesore. The West Egg was home to the nouveaux riches or the newly
rich people, and is regarded with some contempt by the people from the East Egg.
1.2 Gatsbys home was one of the examples of fake architecture on the West Egg. The
owners had tried to give it respectability and an aura of age by growing ivy up its outside
walls. There was a marble swimming pool and forty acres of lawn. The Buchanans
home was enormous, too. Nick calls it elaborate. It was built in the Georgian
Colonial style and was red and white. French windows connected the house with the
exterior. The house was light and airy; the lounge had an elaborate ceiling (probably
some form of pressed steel). There was a quarter of a mile of lawn between the sea and
the front porch. The walls of the building were covered with ivy which seemed to be an
extension of the lawn. There was a sunken garden and half an acre of roses.
1.3 This tells us that we are still in a patriarchal (male dominated) society where a woman
took her identity from her husband and his position in society.
1.4 Tom Buchanan was thirty, had a hard mouth and a superior manner and was arrogant and
aggressive in appearance. He was a man of enormous power with a great pack of
muscle visible under his riding shirt and coat. Nick says that his was a cruel body.
He had a gruff tenor voice and tended to be paternalistic. He controlled the conversation
and the movement of others when he could as he did with Nick.
1.5 Daisy is dressed in white (almost a symbol of her purity). She was beautiful. Her eyes
were bright and her mouth was passionate. Her voice arrested one as it was low and
thrilling. Her conversation was trivial and she did not focus on one topic for long but
changed, almost irrelevantly, from one to another. She talks without conviction and is
basically insincere.
1.6 Nick was from the Middle West. His family had been there for several generations.
They were well off people who had set him to a fine school and university. They had a
 thriving hardware business. When decisions had to be made about his future, the whole
family was consulted. His father was something of a snob and taught him that life
parcels out privilege and decency unfairly to people and that his son must therefore be
tolerant of others. He went to New York after he had returned from World War One and
got himself into the bond business.
1.7 Myrtle Wilson had phoned Tom. She was his current mistress.
1.8 We know this because Nick speaks of a subdued, impassioned murmur being audible
from inside the house the sound of Daisy remonstrating with Tom about the phone call.
Jordan wants to listen in to their fight. Daisy comes back to the table tense but bright
and gay, pretending that nothing has happened. Tom is miserable.
1.9 Tom hurts Daisy (her knuckles are bruised). She tells him off when she thinks he is
phoning a mistress. He lies about who is on the phone. She is not fooled. This is
obviously not a happy marriage as Daisy tells Nick that Tom was nowhere to be found
when their daughter was born, and she was upset and felt abandoned. Nick felt she
should take her child and leave him, but she clearly had no such idea in mind.
1.10 It is the society of the super rich, bored, indolent upper crust.

Chapter 2

2.1 Some oculist with a sense of humour had erected it years before.
2.2 The theme is that of vision, insight, seeing.
2.3 The eyes are a symbol of God watching over a godless society living in a moral
wasteland where peoples vision has faded and their hopes have disintegrated into
ashes.
2.4 It is a place of great poverty, a slum that has rubbish dumps all over the place. The
dust drifts in the air and seems to settle on everything. The inhabitants are poor;
they are grey men and women whose dreams have eluded them and whose lives
are quietly hopeless; they have lost their vitality, their spirit (note: Myrtle sees Tom
as her means of escape from this) and their lives are meaningless. Their environment
is as sterile as the city depicted in The Wasteland of TS Eliot post-World War 1
London is an unreal city, a place of existential angst, of disintegration and
fragmentation.
2.5 She is the wife of the mechanic, George Wilson. She had met Tom on a train bound
for New York. They were seated opposite each other and she could not keep her
eyes off him. When she got off, he pressed against her, and they got into a taxi.
Their affair started from then.
2.6 She is in her mid-thirties, has a thickish figure, is not at all beautiful but is
sensuous and smouldering. Her voice is soft and coarse; she acts in an affected
manner, especially when she goes to their apartment and changes her dress. She
seems to grow too big for the room and almost shout as she speaks. Her attempts to
sound educated are satirised by Nick: Youd OF thought!!! etc.
2.7 She changed into an elaborate chiffon afternoon dress and got very haughty, speaking
and gesturing in a very false and affected manner. She got louder and louder, spoke
disdainfully about the lower classes and used words wrongly in an effort to sound
educated.
2.8 He hit her a short sharp blow across the nose and broke it. He is a violent, abusive
brute of a man; he is controlling and will use force to get his way.
2.9 Supercilious = looking down on others as if they are inferior; anaemic = appears pale
and bloodless; regal = like a king or queen, royal; hauteur = condescending loftiness,
arrogance; deft = practised, quick and skilful.
Chapter 3

3.1 He is presented as a very liberal host who keeps open house and tolerated all sorts of
amusement park behaviour in his house. He spends vast quantities of money
entertaining people he does not even know; his food is abundant, the liquor flows
endlessly and he spare no expense on entertainers for the guests. His house is vast and
the library so convincingly genuine that the drunk man in the library calls him a Belasco.
He is the man onto whose shoulder no woman droops her head, a man alone, about
whom there are many rumours, for example, that he was a German spy or that he killed a
man. He had actually served in the American forces in Europe in World War 1. He has
an enchanting smile that seems to understand exactly what you want him to understand,
but Nick sees past his mask and his old sport affectation to what he really was: a young
roughneck who is very careful to say the right thing in the right way in case he lets
something about his origins slip.
3.2 He was a German spy; he had killed a man.
3.3 The parties were enormously extravagant with the tables groaning under elaborate hors
doeuvres and main dishes. Gatsby has a real bar installed and served all sorts of exotic
cocktails. The champagne was served in huge glasses. The guests often did not know
him or each other; they just arrived and were entertained. They got very drunk and
increasingly inclined to hilarity as the liquor took effect. Jazz was popular Nick talks
of yellow cocktail music. There were famous singers and a composer played one of
his compositions.
3.4 He has a Rolls Royce, two motor boats, an estate car and later another flashy vehicle
makes its appearance. He hires a whole orchestra, not just a band. He has numerous
servants and a chauffeur. He owns a huge house and a huge library with real books in it
(though the pages are uncut) and calls people old sport as if he has had a British
upbringing. He buys a guest a replacement evening dress costing $250.00.
3.5 yellow cocktail music suggests that light, bright kind of popular music in which brass
instruments predominate; romantic speculation means guesses about him that are wild
and unfounded and melodramatic; spectroscopic gaiety means that the fun is like the
spectrum, having a variety of tones and visual forms.
3.6 A very drunk driver drove his coup into the wall and sheered off a front wheel but he
did not know what had happened or how it had happened.
3.7 She thought she was a good driver but she was a careless one who expected other people
to get out of her way. She nearly knocked over a workman and was not very concerned
about it.
3.8 She could not stand being at a disadvantage.
3.9 He has not had much to do with the upper crust and their immorality and dishonesty, so
at this point, he dismisses dishonesty in a woman as a foible not to be taken too seriously
by the stronger sex.
3.10 She had lied about leaving the top of a borrowed car down and it was spoiled by the rain;
she had moved her golf ball in a tournament and lied about it.

Chapter 4

4.1This implies that the partygoers were immoral and took their girlfriends/mistresses to the
affairs at Gatsbys. The usual expression is the world and his wife.
4.2.1 Their likeness to animals is suggested especially in names like The Leeches which
implies that they live off others; the Civets suggests how distastefully smelly these guests
were; the Beavers were probably eager to make their way in the world etc.
4.2.2 Klipspringer suggests that the man of this name moves from place to place but never
staying anywhere for long. He virtually lives at Gatsbys but at the end of the book, he has
moved in elsewhere.
4.2.3 Beluga is the name of the worlds most expensive caviar so the people of this name
are possibly well-to-do.
4.2.4 The Dancies is a sarcastic reference to the people who come along to while their
evenings away in trivial activities like partying and dancing. The Smirks suggests that
these people thought that they were above others and were self-satisfied and therefore wore
smirks on their faces as they were very pleased with themselves.
4.3 He implies that Gatsbys guests come and go but have no interest in who their host is;
they are only there for the food and drink and will move on when they have had what they
came for.
4.4 He said he was the son of rich middle Westerners who had died and left him very well
off. He had been educated at Oxford as it was a family tradition. He had travelled widely
through Europe, had collected things he thought were valuable and had also done some big-
game hunting. He was trying to forget a sad past. He had distinguished himself in World
War 1 and had been decorated for extraordinary valour.
4.5 He looked at Nick sideways as he spoke as if to see what effect his words had had on
him; he also hurried over some phrases for example educated at Oxford as if he were
choking on them because they bothered him.
4.6 Gatsby produces the medal given to him for valour by Montenegro and shows Nick the
photograph of himself at Oxford taken in the quadrangle of Trinity College.
4.7 He refers to the memories the man recalls at lunch: the death of Rosy Rosenthal,
obviously a mobster, and he has cufflinks made out of human molars.
4.8 We suspect that he is into something illegal like bootlegging or that he is involved with
the Mafia gangsters whose centre of operations was in Chicago.
4.9 He never had anything to do with any of the women at the parties and only gets involved
again with Daisy because they had been in love many years before. Tom is no friend of his
so he is not really looking at a friends wife.
4.10 Daisy had met Gatsby in Louisville where she lived and where he was a young officer
in training about to go to war. They seemed to have an understanding because her family
found her packing to go and say goodbye to him and put a stop to it. She recovered from her
disappointment after a while and got married to Tom in a society wedding. The night before
she got married, a letter arrived which distressed her so much that she got drunk. She said
she did not want to marry Tom. Jordan and the maid sobered her up, got her dressed and she
married Tom the next day. The marriage seemed to be working until Tom was in an accident
and the papers revealed his companion to be a hotel chambermaid.
4.11 Daisy suggests a flower, uncomplicated, pretty and innocent. Fay is a Middle English
word for a fairy, so there is a mystical quality about her; she is delicate, lovely, fragile as a
fairy.
4.12 This is to suggest her innocence and purity.
4.13 The little irregularities are the affairs which the fast and moneyed set indulged in.
She is referring to Daisy and her unhappy marriage. Daisy could have found herself a lover.
She could easily have had an affair as she never drank, and could have slipped away
unnoticed while everyone else was intoxicated.
4.14 Gatsby suddenly made sense to Nick he now understood what motivated him and
what caused him to throw the extravagant parties he did parties that had seemed to Nick like
a pure waste of money. He was reborn for Nick in that he seemed like a new person, one
whose motives were now comprehensible. (NB: question misworded)

Chapter 5
5.1 He was wearing a white flannel suit with a silver tie and a gold shirt.
5.2 He offered his a way to make money a confidential job of some sort.
5.3 It is clandestine (secretive) Daisy and Gatsby cant just go and visit each other as she is
a married woman who cannot just visit the house of a single man, nor can she entertain him at
her own house unless there is company. Her husband is not to be told about this tea party
she has to come alone, a fact she finds very mysterious. Nick sets up the meeting at his
house which is neutral territory. Gatsby is a perfect stereotype for the tormented lover,
agitatedly waiting for his long-lost love to reappear after a separation of five years!
5.4 She flirts with Nick calling him her dearest one and asking (jokingly) if he is in love
with her whereas her greeting of Gatsby is strained and formal: I certainly am awfully glad
to see you again.
5.5 He glowed and radiated well-being.
5.6 He wants to show us how extravagantly it is decorated and how he wants to show off by
having a variety of styles of opulent dcor. The rooms are swathed in beautiful materials and
are full of fresh flowers. They have all got dressing rooms and bathrooms with sunken baths
it is a house that has everything.
5.7 His room was simple. He had a bedroom, a bathroom and a study. The only
extravagance was the set of gold brushes on his dressing table (note: toilet set = his hairbrush,
comb and clothes brush, not his loo!)
5.8 He wants to impress her with his wealth and his style. He has a man in England who
buys his clothes for him a detail he wishes them to notice as he is so wealthy he can afford
to have someone overseas choose his clothes for him and ship them across to America. Daisy
may weep because she realises she could have had everything she ever wanted if she had
waited and married Gatsby; she could be a shallow little materialist who values a man simply
by his possessions and who now regrets not having married a man who also, like Tom, could
have provided for her every need, and she is aware of the opportunity she missed.
5.9 Daisy fell short of his dreams about her. He had idealised her and now he comes face to
face with the real flesh and blood woman who has her faults. She cannot possibly measure
up to his image of her and so he has to rearrange his ideas about her.
5.10 It underlines the central concern of the book: there are the very rich who may or may
not have got their wealth honestly (like Gatsby), and there are the people of the valley of
ashes who live lives of hopeless poverty and who will never rise above their circumstances.

Chapter 6.
6.1 He came from North Dakota and was the son of unsuccessful farmers. He did not like
his name (James Gatsby) and so changed it, and possibly his conception of himself,
when he was 17. He fished and dug for clams to earn a living, and tried to get an
education for himself by trading his services as a janitor for tuition fees at St Olafs
school but this did not last long. Gatsby had grand visions of himself and felt there were
no limits to what he could achieve.
6.2 He was a secretary, a steward, sometimes the mate of the yacht and sometimes its
captain. He also locked Cody up when he got drunk, and so functioned as his jailer.
6.3 Buffalo Bills surname was Cody. He was a cowboy from the Wild West, a tough, hard-
bitten, gun-slinging, hard-drinking pioneer. Dan Cody is also a hard, violent man who
had made his fortune from the numerous metal rushes (silver, copper) in the West and
who lived the life of a debauchee, enjoying wine and women to excess.
6.4 She is showing that she knows that Tom is flirting with another woman at the party and
that he will probably go to see her or call her on the telephone. She is not unaware of
his infidelities.
6.5 She disliked the raw vigour and the vulgarity of the party, and was offended by the
showy, empty Broadway types who seem to have no point to their lives and who were on
the road from nothing to nothing.
6.6 She is on the same path but fails to recognize the triviality and emptiness of her own
existence.
6.7 He is feeling lonely and desolate. The party which showed off his wealth, his
connections and his generosity has dismayed Daisy, making all his efforts to please her
vain.
6.8 He wanted her to deny that she had ever loved Tom.
6.9 He thought that they could erase the past, go back to Louisville and be married from her
parents house as if her five years of marriage had never occurred.
6.10 This happened when he kissed her. He now knew that he was not going to climb the
ladder to success alone. He linked his fate to Daisy, committed himself to her, and to do
so, he had to come down to earth, be realistic and live the life of an ordinary mortal.

Chapter 7

7.1 Trimalchio was a freedman he had been the slave of an extremely rich Roman who had
freed him on his death, leaving him his estate and money. The ex-slave then threw
parties of such extravagance that all of Rome knew about them and went to them to eat
the outrageous delicacies he had served up and to participate in the orgy. A caravansary
is an inn at which travelling caravans in the East and North Africa in days gone by used
to camp out for the night before continuing their journeys. Gatsbys parties are as
vulgar as Trimalchios and his house is a roadhouse or an inn for anyone who cares to
wander in.
7.2 Daisy virtually told Gatsby that she loved him when she said he always looked so cool.
Tom saw, was astonished and was so furious that he needed to translate his anger into
physical action - so instead of hitting someone, he suggested they go off to New York.
7.3 He had discovered that Myrtle had a life apart from his and that she was having an affair,
though as yet he did not know who with. He had therefore decided to move West and
take her with him, but he had locked her in her room for good measure.
7.4 Tom had found out about Gatsbys drug stores in New York and Chicago that sold grain
alcohol illegally, so he knew that Gatsby was a bootlegger and in cahoots with
Wolfsheim, and he had recently heard rumours of some new and far more unsavoury
transaction that Gatsby was involved in.
7.5 Yes, he had been, for five months. He had been sent there after the Armistice (peace
negotiations after WW1) as were other young officers.
7.6 He asked too much of her. She had loved Tom and could not go back on that. Possibly
the revelations about Gatsbys illegal activities frightened her; she needed security and
protection from her men. Nick noted that when she was in a position to make the final
break, it did not seem as if she had ever intended to go that far and was in a corner. This
possibly accounted for her reluctance to deny that she had ever loved Tom.
7.7 He knows Daisy well enough to understand that she will not give up her wealth and
security with him and take her chances with a man of Gatsbys shady reputation.
7.8 Myrtle had been locked up upstairs all day. For some reason Wilson had let her out as
the yellow car hove into sight and she wanted Tom (whom she thought was driving) to
talk to Tom and possibly get him to take her away otherwise she would have to go West
with Wilson and never see her lover again.
7.9 George wails and is quite immobilized by his grief. Tom takes control of the situation,
is aware of the suspicion that could fall on him, diverts it and then calms and speaks to
George so that he does not blame him for Myrtles death.
7.10 He wishes to safeguard Daisy against any violence that Tom may offer her in revenge for
her unfaithfulness. This is a hopeless quest as Daisy and Tom have come to some sort
of agreement in the pantry over supper, and , even though neither looks happy, neither is
unhappy, either, so their marriage will go on and Gatsbys chances are doomed.

Chapter 8:
8.1 He was stationed at Camp Taylor prior to going to the Front. The young officers were
invited to various houses, Daisys parents house being one of them. While he was in
uniform, he could pretend to be anything he liked and so, made respectable by it, he was
invited to Daisys house to a place and a society where he would never normally be
welcome - where he met and fell in love with her.
8.2 The barbed wire was their differing social classes.
8.3 He had led her to believe that he could take care of her, that he could offer her security
and had a solid family standing behind him.
8.4 She waited for some time for Gatsby, then started dating and moving in the usual rich
social circles. All the time, she felt the need to some sort of finality about her future. It
was about this time that she met Tom, rich, solid and reassuring Tom whose attention
flattered her and whose wealth and status assured her of a secure future. She could not
wait for Gatsby who, after the war, went to Oxford for five months more by accident
than by design.
8.5 She had made a pact of some sort with her husband (remember Nick seeing them in the
pantry, looking as if they were conspiring?) and had simply blotted Gatsby out of her
life.
8.6 He tells him that he is worth the whole rotten bunch of spoiled, wealthy characters (e.g.
Daisy and Tom and their ilk).
8.7 Wilson in his deluded state sees Dr T J Eckleburg as a symbol of divine power; however,
the pragmatic Michaelis sees the whole ideal of a higher moral power as some sort of
propaganda, like advertising, and clearly dismisses the whole concept of divine
intervention or retribution.
8.8 No, George believed that she had been run down deliberately he wanted to pin the
blame on but Tom had an alibi.
8.9 Wilson wandered over to Port Roosevelt and took some time to reach the next place he
was seen at: Gads Hill (12h00). He did not eat the sandwich or drink the coffee he had
bought. He was seen by several boys who had noticed a man behaving peculiarly, and
several motorists saw a man standing by the roadside, staring oddly. He vanished for
three hours possibly looking for the yellow car by calling at garages where it might be,
but no garage man came forward to say this. However, he found his way to Gatsbys
house so someone must have given him a lead.
8.10 The word holocaust means wholesale sacrifice or destruction. Here it means that
three peoples lives were destroyed, three people died bloody deaths: Myrtle, Gatsby and
Wilson.

Chapter 9
9.1 Nick, the Lutheran minister, Mr Gatz, some of the servants, the postman from West Egg
and Owl Eyes attended the funeral.
9.2 Wolfshiem did not want to get mixed up in anything to do with Gatsby and made the
excuse that people must value others when they are alive, not when they are dead.
Klipspringer had moved in with people he could live off for a while and only wanted his
tennis shoes but, despite the fact that he had availed himself of Gatsbys hospitality, he
wriggled out of coming to pay his last respects. Daisy sent neither wire nor flowers.
9.3.1 He cannot tell the old man that Gatsby had no friend in the world, so he lied to him to
make him feel better.
9.3.2 He is a decent, responsible person who feels that it is not right to abandon Gatsby, even
though he is dead, and even though he owes him nothing, so he takes it upon himself to
arrange the funeral and get people to come to the service.
9.4 Gatsby may have left home and upset his parents by doing so when he was a youngster,
but he did not forget them when he made a fortune and saw to it that they had money
and housing, so he was a generous, even a caring son.
9.5 It is a place where no one cares, where there is always some sort of drunken revelry,
where people go to parties dressed to the nines, but they neither know who other people
are, nor do they care. The whole scenario is bleak, grotesque and without any beauty or
grace, therefore it resembles the nightmarish visions of El Greco.
9.6 He came from an old family who had lived in the same house for decades; he belonged to
the West with its small boring towns with their small populations that all knew each other
and each others business. He was used to the security of family, friends and familiar
surroundings and to people being interested in you as a person, even if this meant kindly
interference and gossip. The East was coldly impersonal and uncaring. He could never
understand this.
9.7.1 He had told him where the owner of the yellow car lived.
9.7.2 He was threatened and wanted to divert the danger from himself, so he directed Wilson
to Gatsbys house, knowing full well that he would shoot Gatsby. He obviously had
not learned the truth from Daisy. He hated Gatsby and felt he was getting his just
desserts.
9.7.3 He is a moral coward.
9.8 He says that are careless people who disregard others, smash up lives and then just
walk away, protected by their vast wealth. They have no sense of morality or
responsibility to others.
9.9 They saw a new world and a chance to make a new beginning, to realise their
aspirations/visions and realise their grand dreams.
9.10 Although experience tells us that the achievement of grand dreams and visions does
not occur in reality, we still dream on, striving against the way of the world, rowing
upstream against a current that is always defeating our efforts to change and remake
our world. Our efforts to concretise these grand dreams is doomed from the outset, but
we strive on up the river, regardless of how futile this activity may be.