Great Gatsby Review

Major Themes:

Death of the American Dream:

This can be explained by how Gatsby came to get his fortune. Through his dealings with organized crime he didn't adhere to the American Dream guidelines. Nick also suggests this with the manner in which he talks about all the rich characters in the story. The immoral people have all the money. Of course looking over all this like the eyes of God are those of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg on the billboard.

Repeating the past:

Gatsby's whole being since going off to war is devoted to getting back together with Daisy and have things be the way they were before he left. That's why Gatsby got a house like the one Daisy used to live in right across the bay from where she lives. He expresses this desire by reaching towards the green light on her porch early in the book. The last paragraph, So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past reinforces this theme.

Immorality that was besieging the 1920's: 

Fitzgerald was in his twenty's when he wrote this novel and since he went to Princeton he was considered a spokesman for his generation. He wrote about the third theme which is the immorality that was besieging the 1920's. Organized crime ran rampant, people were partying all the time, and affairs were common play. The last of which Fitzgerald portrays well in this novel.

The Eyes of T. J. Eckleburg:

George Wilson compares them to the eyes of God looking over the valley of Ashes. The unmoving eyes on the billboard look down on the Valley of Ashes and see all the immorality and garbage of the times. By the end of the novel you will realize that this symbolizes that God is dead.

Society and Class
Love
Wealth
Dissatisfaction
Isolation
Marriage
Gender
Education
Lies and Deceit
Compassion and Forgiveness
Religion

Questions that would be good to Answer:

1.    Does that definition of success in America transcend the divides of social class, race, sex, gender, and citizenship?

2.    Is the novel a satiric or realistic representation of life in the 1920s?

3.    Questions about the American Dream

4.    How the novel reflects the authors life

5.    How colors affect the meaning/flow of the novel

6.    Relate to the reaction of WWI?

7.    Money leads to happiness?

8.    Questions about how time passes

9.    Questions about how rumors affect people

10.    The use of weather to reflect the mood of the story

11.    Absence of God

Literary Devices:

Symbols:

Owl-Eyed man

Gatsby’s unopened books

The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg

The Valley of Ashes Below

Green Light

Colors

Wolfshiem’s cufflinks made of human teeth (connection to the underworld)

Motifs:

Time

Geography (West/East Egg)

Weather

Important Scenes:

•    Nick moves to West Egg

•    Nick meets up with Daisy and Tom

•    Nick gets invited to Gatsby’s party

•    Nick meets Gatsby

•    Tom shows Nick his other woman

•    Jordan, Gatsby and Nick arrange to have Gatsby and Daisy meet at Nick’s house

•    Gatsby and Daisy tell Tom about there affair and Daisy tells Tom she doesn’t love him

•    Daisy accidentally hit and killed Tom’s in the street

•    Wilson kills Gatsby and then kills himself

•    Nick meets Gatsby’s father

•    Funeral – no one comes to Gatsby's funeral despite his popular parties

•    Nick decides to return back west

Characters:

•    Jay Gatsby

•    Nick Carraway

•    Daisy Buchanan

•    Jordan Baker

•    George Wilson

•    Myrtle Wilson

•    Meyer Wolfsheim

•    Owl Eyes

•    Klipspringer

Structure:

The novel is really a story within a story, for Nick Carraway, the frame narrator of Gatsby’s plot, is really a protagonist himself. Additionally, there is another subplot revolving around the triangle of Myrtle, Wilson, and Tom. Much of the story is also told as flashbacks, so the chronological order of the plot is constantly interrupted. Fitzgerald, however, masterfully intertwines all the plots and all the flashbacks into a unified whole.

Summary:

Our narrator, Nick Carraway, begins the book by giving us some advice of his father’s about not criticizing others. Through Nick’s eyes, we meet his second cousin, Daisy Buchanan, her large and aggressive husband, Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker, who quickly becomes a romantic interest for our narrator (probably because she’s the only girl around who isn’t his cousin). While the Buchanans live on the fashionable East Egg (we’re talking Long Island, NY in the 1920’s, by the way), Nick lives on the less-elite but not-too-shabby West Egg, which sits across the bay from its twin town. We are soon fascinated by a certain Mr. Jay Gatsby, a wealthy and mysterious man who owns a huge mansion next door to Nick and spends a good chunk of his evenings standing on his lawn and looking at an equally mysterious green light across the bay.

Tom takes Nick to the city to show off his mistress, a woman named Myrtle Wilson who is, of course, married. (Fidelity is a rare bird in this novel.) Myrtle’s husband, George, is a passive, working class man who owns an auto garage and is oblivious to his wife’s extramarital activities. Nick is none too impressed by Tom.

Back on West Egg, this Gatsby fellow has been throwing absolutely killer parties, where everyone and his mother can come and get wasted and try to figure out how Gatsby got so rich. Nick meets and warily befriends the mystery man at one of his huge Saturday night affairs. He also begins spending time with Jordan, who turns out to be loveable in all her cynical practicality.

Moving along, Gatsby introduces Nick to his "business partner," Meyer Wolfsheim. Everyone (that is, Nick and readers everywhere) can tell there’s something fishy about Gatsby’s work, his supposed Oxford education, and his questionable place among society’s elite. Next, Gatsby reveals to Nick (via Jordan, in the middle school phone-tag kind of way) that he and Daisy had a love thing before he went away to the war and she married Tom (after a serious episode of cold feet that involved whisky and a bath tub). Gatsby wants Daisy back. The plan is for Nick to invite her over to tea and have her casually bump into Gatsby.

Nick executes the plan; Gatsby and Daisy are reunited and start an affair. Everything continues swimmingly until Tom meets Gatsby, doesn’t like him, and begins investigating into his affairs. Nick, meanwhile, has revealed Gatsby’s true past to us: he grew up in a poor, uneducated family, and would in all likelihood have stayed that way had he not met the wealthy and elderly Dan Cody, who took him in as a companion and taught him what he needed to know. Yet it wasn’t Dan that left Gatsby his oodles of money – that part of his life is still suspicious.

The big scene goes down in the city, when Tom has it out with Gatsby over who gets to be with Daisy; in short, Gatsby is outed for being a bootlegger and Daisy is unable to leave her husband for her lover. As the party drives home to Long Island, Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, is struck and killed by Gatsby’s car (in which Gatsby and Daisy are riding). Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was driving, but that he’s going to take the blame for it. Tom, meanwhile, feeds Gatsby to the wolves by telling George where to find the man that killed his wife, Myrtle. George Wilson shoots and kills Gatsby before taking his own life.

Daisy and Tom take off, leaving their mess behind. Nick, who by now is fed up with ALL of these people, breaks things off with Jordan in a rather brusque way. He is the only one left to take care of Gatsby’s affairs and arrange for his funeral, which, save one peculiar former guest, none of Gatsby’s party-goers attend. Nick does meet Gatsby’s father, who fills in the picture we have of Gatsby’s youth. Standing on Gatsby’s lawn and looking at the green light (which, not accidentally, turned out to be the light in front of Daisy’s house across the bay), Nick concludes that our nostalgia, our desire to replicate the past, forces us constantly back into it.