Study Guide for The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Chapter 8 (154-170)

Compare this description of Gatsby's mansions (ie Gatsby's brain) with earlier ones (particularly the night before he reunites with Daisy (86-87)):

His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches--once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn't been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table, with two stale, dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room, we sat smoking out into the darkness. (154-55)

Jay Gatz's True Biography (155-162)

Now that his relationship with Daisy is over, now that "'Jay Gatsby' had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice" (155), Jay Gatz can tell the story of his youth with Dan Cody and his original courtship of Daisy. Why did he fall in love with her? How did he deceive himself?

Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor. (157)

What makes Tom Buchanan a better match for Daisy? Does Gatsby ever accept that? What does Gatsby mean when he describes Daisy's love for Tom as "just personal" (160)? Nick says, "What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured?" (160)

What are the last words Nick says to Gatsby? (162) Why does it make Gatsby so happy?

Paragraph: What ultimately separates Gatsby from Daisy? Is it class? Or is the barrier something else?  To what extent could any real woman live up to the dreams Gatsby spins about Daisy and her wealthy lifestyle?

Flashback to the Night of Myrtle's Death (163-170)

As George Wilson pieces together the evidence (the yellow car, the dog-collar, the broken nose) which will lead him to conclude that Gatsby murdered his wife, he stares out the window at the billboard of  Dr. T. J. Eckleburg and mutters to himself, "God sees everything." (167)

What is Fitzgerald up to? Unpack his use of imagery. Are we meant to understand the coming catastrophe as the just vengeance of God? Or are we in the presence of another kind of fatality?

How did George discover that Gatsby was the owner of the yellow car?

What does Nick imagine Gatsby was thinking about as he floated in the pool, waiting for the phone call from Daisy that he must finally have realized would never come?

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (169)

Consider the imagery Fitzgerald uses in his staging of Gatsby's murder scene: the late summer/early autumn afternoon, leaves in the pool, Gatsby floating aimlessly on his 'pneumatic tube', and George Wilson's lifeless body in the weeds:

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other with little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water. (170)

Paragraph: Make sense of Gatsby's murder as part of Fitzgerald's overall purpose in the novel?

Chapter 9 (171-189)

Gatsby's Funeral (172- 183)

Why is it that Nick has to make the arrangements for Gatsby's funeral? How does Wolfsheim respond to Gatsby's death? How does Klipspringer respond?

How does Daisy respond when she finds out that he is dead?

What final pieces of the Gatsby puzzle fall in place when Nick goes to visit Wolfsheim on the morning of Gatsby's funeral? (179-80)

Who alone grieves for Gatsby's death? When he was a boy, what had Gatsby scribbled in the back of his copy of "Hopalong Cassidy" (shades of Ben Franklin)? (181)

Who is present at the graveyard when Gatsby is buried?

Nick's Return to the West (183-189)

As Nick recalls the holidays when he returned home from the East as a college student, he thinks about how he, Daisy, Tom, Jordan, and Gatsby were all Mid-Westerners who never really fit into life on the East Coast. Why? 

What new understanding of his home has Nick achieved by venturing East? (183-185)

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home. (185)

Analyze the El Greco painting that Nick imagines whenever he thinks of his experience that summer:

I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house--the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares. (185)

Compare that image to the final one of Tom and Daisy:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . . (187-88)

Did Tom ever find out about who was driving the car which ran over Myrtle? (187)

On the night before Tom leaves to return home, he goes out on Gatsby's beach and lies down, looking at the stars and musing about the history of Long Island Sound. He imagines the arrival of the Dutch, the first Europeans to settle Manhattan and wonders about the dreams they had as they gazed at the "fresh, green breast of the new world" (189). Those dreams, Nick argues, might have measured up to Gatsby's dreams. Nick muses about whether anyone will ever dream like that again, and then concludes his story with one of the most famous passages in American literature;

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

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--to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (189)

Paragraph: Unpack this image. What has Nick learned about the American Dream?