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Study
Guide for The Great Gatsby ( by F.
Scott Fitzgerald
Then wear the gold
hat, if that will move her;
The Setting: Great
Neck, Long Island and
Chapter One (5-26)
Nick’s
Introduction (Fitzgerald’s Narrative Point of View) (5-7): The narrator of Gatsby’s story
is also a character in it: Nick Carroway. What does Nick tell us about
himself? Gatsby himself is only revealed to us gradually, and he rarely
holds center stage in the action of the novel. We see him through Nick's eyes and
imagination. Why did Fitzgerald choose this curious lens through which
to view his central character? (Compare to Marlow in Heart
of Darkness) (The Ancient Mariner in Coleridge's 'Rime')
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." (6)
By the end of this summer, though, Nick has changed his mind about always 'reserving judgment about people' and decided to return home from the East, disgusted with what he has seen and the Easterners he has come to know. Only Gatsby, a person whom he feels he should scorn, has escaped Nick's condemnation.
What does Nick say about Gatsby which helps us understand why Nick feels it is so important for him to tell us this story? (6-7) (QUOTE) Why is Nick writing this memoir?
Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were relatedto one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament."--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--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. (7) 
From what part of the country
and which social class does Nick come? Does Nick's family have
any special claims to an upperclass bloodline? Where did he go to
college?
How does he refer to his combat
experience in the Great War (WWI)? (Why so glib?)
How old is Nick when he comes
to
How does Nick plan to become a ‘well-rounded man’? (How instead will he really learn about life during this summer?)
Paragraph: How does
Fitzgerald characterize East Egg society as represented by the Daisy,
Tom and Jordan? Pay attention to fleeting images as they whir by
in Fitzgerald's
flawless prose. In a masterpiece like this one, every image takes you
directly to the heart of the artist's purpose. What do you make of this
one:
"Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. 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." (10)
Fitzgerald makes an odd allusion to the Columbus
story as he introduces us to the primary setting of his story,
and we recall a time when the Western Hemisphere was brand new to the
European mind: it was a place where dreams could be hatched... but
there was something wrong with the eggs in the Columbus story.... This
is where Daisy lives.
How is West Egg different from East Egg? Describe Gatsby’s mansion. (Hotel de Ville)
How is this spectacular home different from the
Party
#1: Dinner
with the Tom Buchanans (10-26) Tom Buchanan
(10-12) What was the highpoint of Tom Buchanan’s life? (10) (See picture of Pudge Heffinger.)
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-- a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. (11) From what part of the country does Tom come? How has he made his money? Note the cinematic way in which Fitzgerald gives Tom his entrance. (11) (QUOTE) (Georgia Colonial Mansion)
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens-- finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. How does Fitzgerald convey Tom’s character in his physical description of him? (11) Daisy
Buchanan (12-14) Note
also the cinematic way in which Fitzgerald introduces Daisy (and
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. Nick is fascinated by Daisy’s voice. What does she sound like? What is the source of her charm? (13-14) (QUOTE)
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. (13-14) What about Daisy and Tom’s child? Does Nick get to meet the little girl? How
does Fitzgerald characterize
I looked at Miss
Baker, wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at
her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she
accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.
Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity
out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had
seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before. (15) The conversation is going nowhere until Jordan mentions that she has heard of Nick's neighbor: Gatsby.
Describe Daisy's reaction when she learns that Gatsby lives near her? (15)
"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?" (15) The
Dinner Scene (16-22)
Who calls Tom on the telephone during dinner and demands to speak with him? Whoever it is Daisy gets upset and jumps up from the table and goes into the house to argue with Tom. Jordan must explain: (19-20)
"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker,
honestly surprised.
What social rule about marital infidelity in the upper crust is Tom breaking? What is done and not done by the very rich in their love affairs? Note
the
comment that Daisy
makes when she returns to the dinner table. Here again we have one of
those fleeting moments which reveal so much when imaginatively read:
Fitzgerald is alluding to the famous Keats poem "Ode to a Nightingale"? (Do you know it?) It was Fitzgerald's favorite poem. What is the purpose of this literary allusion? What does the image of the nightingale have to do with Fitzgerald’s conception of Daisy (and the American Dream)? What, though, is the reality of Daisy’s marriage with Tom as she describes it to Nick when they are alone on the porch? (21-22) (QUOTE) Referring to her three year old daughter, Daisy says,
"I suppose she talks, and--eats, and everything."
Gatsby’s Entrance (25-26) Nick's introduction to the East ends with another haunting symbol. Notice the cinematic way in which Fitzgerald welcomes Gatsby on to the stage of his drama. (25-26) (QUOTE)
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone-- fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
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