The Great Gatsby s6

The Great Gatsby: Essay Prompts

1. The American Dream--as it arose in the Colonial period and developed in the nineteenth century-- was based on the assumption that each person, no matter what his or her origins, could succeed in life on the sole basis of his or her own skill and effort.

The Great Gatsby is a novel about what happened to the American dream in the 1920s, a period when the old values that gave substance to the dream had been corrupted by the vulgar pursuit of wealth.

What Fitzgerald seems to be criticizing in The Great Gatsby is not the American Dream itself but the corruption of the American Dream. What was once--for Ben Franklin, for example, or Thomas Jefferson--a belief in hard work has become what Nick Carraway calls "the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty." In other words, the energy that might have gone into the pursuit of noble goals has been channeled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy, but fundamentally empty form of success.

Carefully discuss HOW this criticism of modernity is shown in the book and why.

2. Style refers to the way a writer puts words together and the way in which s/he ‘tells’ the story. Style refers to HOW s/he writes: the length and rhythm of his sentences, the use of contrasts, parallels, irony, figurative language, symbolism, dialogue, description, etc.

How does Fitzgerald’s style and structure emphasize the central ideas of the novel’s major themes?

3. The word “careless” sums up one of the most important topics in the book. Nick refers to Jordan, Tom, and Daisy as being careless in one form or another. Their actions are careless and they are unconcerned about others, generally. This is due to the ease of their life. They live a decadent life that many writers of the modern period criticized. The mindless, indulgent, irresponsible way of life, in which consequence is just an afterthought, is scrutinized in The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald uses these characters to expose its superficiality with their selfish actions.

Discuss the theme Fitzgerald illustrates by exposing this carelessness and show that these careless characters help to illustrate this theme.

4. In Chapter Seven, Nick remembers that it is his thirtieth birthday. He, like Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy, came East to get away from his past; now that his youth is officially over, he realizes that he may have made a mistake to come East, and begins a period of reevaluation that leads to his eventual decision to return to the Middle West. The Great Gatsby is the story of Nick's initiation into life. His trip East gives him the education he needs to grow up. The novel can, therefore, be called a bildungsroman--the German word for a story about a young man. We simply call them by the more general description of “Coming of Age” or “Rite of Passage” stories. (Other examples of a bildungsroman are The Red Badge of Courage, David Copperfield, and The Catcher in the Rye.) Nick, in a sense, writes The Great Gatsby to show us what he has learned.

So, what has he learned? What is the lesson Nick is offering his reader? How is the lesson made clear considering Nick’s inability to judge? 5. The past is of central importance in the novel, whether it is Gatsby's personal past (his fling with Daisy in 1917) or the larger historical past to which Nick refers in the closing sentence of the novel: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The past holds something that both Gatsby and Nick seem to long for: a simpler, better, nobler time, perhaps, a time when people believed in the importance of the family and the church. Tom, Daisy and Jordan are creatures of the present-- Fitzgerald tells us little or nothing about their pasts--and it is this relationship with the present moment that makes them so attractive, and also so rootless and spiritually empty.

Identify the theme developed in the novel regarding the significance of the past and discuss the way in which a character (or characters) illustrate this theme.

6. The eyes of T. J. Eckleburg convey a major theme in the novel. 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 some say this image symbolizes that God is dead.

Discuss the meaning/s of this symbol and the ways in which it helps to reinforce a central theme.

7. Compare the characters of Nick and Gatsby. One critic has compared Nick and Gatsby in the following way: "Nick’s mind is conservative and historical, as is his lineage; Gatsby’s is radical and apocalyptic—as rootless as his heritage. Nick is too much immersed in time and reality; Gatsby is hopelessly out of it. Nick is always withdrawing, while Gatsby pursues the green light. Nick can’t be hurt, but neither can he be happy. Gatsby can experience ecstasy, but his fate is necessarily tragic."

Analyze the similarities and differences between these two men and of what these similarities and differences inform the reader.

*this prompt can be slightly adjusted to deal with any pairing of characters from the text

8. Fitzgerald skillfully wove colors into his novel. Sometimes the colors carry traditional connotations, other times they do not and are used satirically.

Analyze the color white in the novel. When does it falsify a sense of innocence? When does it symbolize true innocence? What are we supposed to understand about the world through Fitzgerald’s use of color?

*this prompt can be slightly adjusted as to allow a discussion of another color

9. Some critics believe that Nick, not Gatsby, is the hero of the story. Why might you come to this conclusion? Do you agree? As always, explain yourself.

10. Original thesis