Discussion Questions

Chapter 4 of The Great Gatsby

1. Gatsby reveals that he is “the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West” (65). When Nick asks what part of the Middle West he is from, Gatsby answers, “San Francisco” (65). What is odd about Gatsby’s answer? How does his answer change how readers view Gatsby’s account of his personal history?

2. What do you make of how Nick describes Gatsby’s account of his personal history? When Gatsby shares his personal history, Nick compares his language to fabric that has been worn thin from overuse: “The phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’” (66). Is Nick merely picking on Gatsby for using clichéd language? Or is he accusing Gatsby of something more? Does Nick’s fabric metaphor

convey a suspicion that Gatsby’s stories may be fabricated? Why might Nick compare Gatsby’s depiction of himself to a literary “‘character’”? Nick compares the experience of listening to Gatsby’s personal history to the experience of reading popular — i.e. lowbrow — fiction: “it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines” (66). Why might Gatsby need to fashion himself after a literary character?

3. Just as Nick is about to dismiss Gatsby’s stories as a skein of lies, Gatsby produces a war medal with his name inscribed on the back. He also shares a photograph of himself playing cricket at Oxford. Astonished at the sight of these artifacts, Nick reverses his thinking about Gatsby’s history: “Then it was all true” (67). Why do the material artifacts change Nick’s mind? Would they change your mind? Do they serve to authenticate Gatsby’s stories? If so, how?

II. Underground Economies

4. When Gatsby and Nick are being driven into Manhattan, their car is slowed by a policeman who threatens to slap them with a speeding ticket. Yet when Gatsby waves a “white card,” the policeman apologizes for failing to recognize him and lets the car go (68). What does this incident reveal about Gatsby?

5. Who is Meyer Wolfsheim? What does he do for a living? How do you know? Why are his eyes described as having “roved very slowly all around the room” (71)? Why is he careful to “inspect” all of the other patrons in the restaurant (71)? Although Wolfsheim asserts that he prefers the restaurant across the street, he asserts that it’s “too hot over there” (70). What does he mean when he refers to the other restaurant as too “hot”?

6. Gatsby describes Meyer Wolfsheim not only as a “gambler” but as “the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919” (73). As you may know, the 1919 World Series was “fixed” by a gambler named Arnold Rothstein, who allegedly bribed several members of the Chicago White Sox — the team that had won the world series in 1917 — to lose several games and throw the series to the inferior Cincinnati Reds. The incident caused millions of dedicated baseball fans to lose their faith in the sport. Why might Fitzgerald have chosen to include this anecdote in The Great Gatsby?

III. Tom’s Recklessness

7. Shortly after the Buchanans return from their honeymoon, Tom Buchanan gets into a car accident while driving in Santa Barbara: “Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night, and ripped a front wheel off his car” (77). Does this accident resemble any automobile accidents described in previous chapters? The newspapers report that Tom had been riding in the car with “one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel” (77). What does this detail reveal about Tom? Why would an arrogant elitist like Tom welcome a working-class woman into in his car? Do you notice anything similar about the types of women — a mechanic’s wife, a hotel cleaning woman — whom he takes for a ride? What price does the chambermaid end up paying?

III. The Romance: Gatsby & Daisy

8. Toward the middle of this chapter, Nick’s narration breaks off and is replaced by Jordan’s narration of how, five years earlier, a lieutenant named Jay Gatsby courted the eighteen-year-old Daisy Fay. What does Jordan’s story reveal about Daisy’s background? How do Daisy’s parents feel about her romance with the lieutenant? What do Daisy’s parents prevent her from doing? What do they encourage her to do instead?

9. Why does Gatsby recruit other characters to tell his story and do his bidding? For example, why does Gatsby ask Jordan Baker to tell Nick the story of when he met and fell in love with Daisy? Why doesn’t Gatsby share his story directly? To take another example, why does Gatsby ask Nick to invite Daisy over for tea? Why doesn’t Gatsby invite Daisy for tea at

his own house? Why doesn’t he feel like he can court Daisy directly? Finally, why does Gatsby enlist the objects in his house to tell the story of his economic ascendance?

10. On the day before she is scheduled to marry Tom Buchanan, Daisy receives a letter that causes her to break down in tears and declare that she has “change[d] her min[d]” about the wedding (76). Who wrote the letter that Daisy receives? What does Daisy’s reaction to the letter reveal about her feelings toward the person who wrote it? Daisy ends up getting married despite the feelings provoked by the letter. What does this reveal about Daisy’s ability to compartmentalize her emotions? What do you make of the way in which Daisy clings to Tom after they’ve returned from their honeymoon?

Passage Analysis Chapter Five

iI. Time & Timeliness

Discussion Questions

Chapter 5 of The Great Gatsby

1. When Gatsby is finally reunited with Daisy after almost five years, the imagery of watches and clocks — and the theme of time — become increasingly prominent. For example, just before Daisy arrives, Gatsby looks at his watch and decides to go home, announcing, “Nobody’s coming to tea. It’s too late!” (85). And after Daisy does finally arrive, Gatsby leans against the mantle in Nick’s living room and nearly knocks the “mantelpiece clock” onto the floor (86).

Then, when Daisy asserts that they “haven’t met for many years,” Gatsby abruptly responds, “Five years next November” (87). And roughly an hour later, when he takes Daisy on a tour of his house, Gatsby will be described as “running down like an overwound clock” (92). Why might Fitzgerald choose to make so many references to time — to timeliness, belatedness, and bad timing — in this chapter?

2. In Chapter One, Nick was taken on a tour of Tom Buchanan’s house. In Chapter Five, Daisy is taken on a tour of Gatsby’s house. How are the two tours — and the tour guides — similar? How are they different?

II. Dream vs. Reality

3. When, after five years of waiting, Gatsby finally reunites with his beloved Daisy, he seems oddly distracted and foggy-headed. Far from focusing on Daisy herself, Gatsby seems preoccupied with the “idea” or “dream” of Daisy that he’s spent five years building up in his head (92). “Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [. . .] Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one” (93). Does gaining Daisy entail losing “enchanted objects” like the green light? Does it also entail losing the enchanted object that is his idea or dream of Daisy? To what extend does getting what we want inevitably entail losing something? To what extent does it entail losing the idealized object that had initially stirred our desire? In order for the people and objects that we desire to remain “enchanted,” would we need to keep those objects at a distance? Why or why not?

4. When he is taking his guests a tour of the grounds of his mansion, Gatsby observes that Daisy has “a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock” (92). Reflecting on what the green light must mean to Gatsby, Nick speculates, “Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever” (93). What is the light’s “colossal significance”? Why might Gatsby have cause to worry that it had “now vanished forever”?

III. New York City

5. In Chapter Four, when Nick and Gatsby were crossing the bridge into Manhattan, Nick described the city as “rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world” (68). How would you describe the language that Nick uses to portray New York City? Is his language realistic or romantic? What does Nick take the city to represent? Do you see any resemblance between Nick’s view of Manhattan and Gatsby’s view of Daisy’s green light?

IV. Gatsby’s Shirts

6. Recalling the features of Gatsby’s bedroom, Nick initially describes his neighbor’s shirts as if they were an element of the architecture, a kind of house within the house: “shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high” (92). Interestingly, however, Gatsby begins to disassemble this carefully constructed edifice, scattering the shirts into a field of pure color. “He took a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids and coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue” (92). What might his willingness to allow his stacks of expensive shirts to unravel into a “many-colored disarray” reveal about Gatsby’s personality (92)? Why does the “soft rich heap” of shirts cause Daisy to “cry stormily” (92)? Finally, why might Fitzgerald employ the rhetorical device of polysyndeton — the unnecessary repetition of conjunctions such as “and” — in phrases like “shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids and coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange”? How does the abundance of conjunctions influence the emotional tone of the passage?

Discussion Questions

Chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby

1. It is in Chapter Six that readers finally learn about Gatsby’s origins and personal history. What is Jay Gatsby’s real name? Where was Gatsby raised? What did his parents do for a living? Did Gatsby ever go to college? For how long? How did the teenage Gatsby support himself?

2. In Chapter Five, readers learned that Gatsby keeps a “large photograph” of a man named Dan Cody on the wall above his desk (93). In Chapter Six, readers learn more about Cody’s influence on Gatsby. Who is Dan Cody? What role has he played in Gatsby’s life? In what way to Gatsby’s experiences with Dan Cody amount to an “education” (101)? What does Gatsby learn from Cody?

II. Impressions of West Egg

3. Reflecting on his impressions of West Egg, Nick admits that he has “grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures” (104). Yet a few pages later, Nick describes West Egg as an “unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village” (107). Why does Nick describe the neighborhood in this way? What is “unprecedented” about West Egg? How is it connected to Broadway? And what might Nick mean when he refers to the inhabitants of West Egg as being “herded [. . .] along a short-cut from nothing to nothing” (107)?

4. Nick describes Daisy as being “offended” and “appalled” by the social scene at Gatsby’s party: “She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village” (107). After the party, Gatsby himself admits, “She didn’t like it” (109). Yet when Tom dismisses the diverse range of partygoers as a “menagerie,” Daisy responds by affirming, “At least they’re more interesting than the people we know” (107, 108). And as the Buchanans are getting into the limousine that will take them back to more exclusive East Egg, Daisy seems to be intrigued by the democratic atmosphere of Gatsby’s gala: “After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside?” (108). Could Daisy be experiencing conflicted feelings about Gatsby’s party? How does she really feel?

III. Common People

5. When Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy sit down for dinner, Tom asks if he can “eat with some people over here” (105). After a moment, Daisy looks around and concludes that “the girl was ‘common but pretty’” (105). To whom is Daisy referring when she refers to “the girl”? What does Daisy mean when she calls the girl “common”? How does Tom’s behavior resonate with actions described in previous chapters? What does it say about his personality? And what does Daisy’s use of this word “common” say about her personality?

IV. Recover the Past?

6. At this point in the novel, it is fairly clear that Gatsby hopes Daisy will renounce her marriage with Tom Buchanan. Yet the narrator reports that Gatsby also hopes he and Daisy will “go back to Louisville and be married from her house — just as if it were five years ago” (109). Why would Gatsby hope to marry Daisy “from her house”? When Nick cautions that “[y]ou can’t repeat the past,” Gatsby responds, “Why of course you can!” (110). Gatsby’s response suggests that what he wants is not just to reclaim Daisy but to recover how their relationship had been in the past. What does this tell you about Gatsby’s character?

7. This chapter concludes with three paragraphs
that take readers back to the night when Gatsby and Daisy shared their first kiss. “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God” (110). What does the narrator mean when he describes Gatsby as having “wed” his “visions” to Daisy’s “perishable breath”? Why might Fitzgerald choose to include a flashback at the end of this chapter?

Homework- Read Chapter 8

Thursday

Discussion Questions

Chapter 7 of The Great Gatsby 

I. Gatsby & Daisy: Planning a Future?

1. At the beginning of Chapter Seven, Nick receives a series of telephone calls in which both Gatsby and Daisy invite him to have lunch at the Buchanans’ house on the following day. Nick realizes that Gatsby and Daisy are planning something, and he wonders whether they’ve chosen this occasion to create “the rather harrowing scene that Gatsby had outlined in the garden” (114). At the end of the previous chapter, when Nick and Gatsby were talking in the garden, Gatsby had announced that he was going “to fix everything just the way it was before” (110). Why do you think Gatsby and Daisy have scheduled this lunch at the Buchanans’ house? What do you think they might be planning?

Are they planning to announce that Daisy wishes to end her marriage with Tom and reunite with Gatsby? Why or why not?

2. Many of chapters in The Great Gatsby are filled with symbolic weather that reinforces the emotional dynamics between the characters. Chapter Seven is filled with imagery related to the opposing temperatures of hot and cool. For example, Nick describes the weather on that day as “broiling,” “simmering,” and “the warmest [. . .] of the summer” (114). When Daisy welcomes Nick, Jordan, and Gatsby into their home, she asks Tom to make everyone a “cold drink” — then she proceeds to kiss Gatsby on the mouth (116). Returning with four glasses of “cold ale,” Tom observes that “the sun’s getting hotter every year” (118). And Daisy tells Gatsby that she loves him by announcing, “You always look so cool” (119). How do Fitzgerald’s descriptions of the weather or the temperature help to reinforce the interpersonal tensions in this chapter? Do any of the characters reveal hot tempers? What does it mean for Gatsby to look “cool”?

II. Tom Buchanan: Discovery & Confrontation

3. In this pivotal chapter, Tom Buchanan finally discovers that his wife harbors romantic feelings for Gatsby: “She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw” (119). How would you expect Tom to respond to this discovery? Would you expect him to confront Daisy about her feelings? How does Tom actually respond? Whom does he confront? What is his aim in confronting that person?

4. Why might Tom insist on driving Gatsby’s car to New York City?
When Gatsby protests that the car is low on gas, Tom responds,
“Plenty of gas. [. . .] And if it runs out I can stop at a drug-store. You
can buy anything at a drug-store nowadays” (121). What is Tom
suggesting here? How might Tom’s words amount to a subtle jab at Gatsby?

5. When he learns that Daisy may be in love with Gatsby, Tom responds by casting aspersions on what he perceives as a decline in traditional values. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to his wife. [. . .] Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white” (130). Why might Tom make recourse to such generalizations? What do they reveal about his values? Is Tom worried primarily about losing his wife? Orisheworriedaboutlosinghiseconomic,racial,andgenderprivilege?

III. George & Tom: Parallel Situations?

6. Why does George Wilson suddenly “want to get away” (123)? What does he know? Do you detect any similarities between George’s situation and Tom’s situation? Why had Tom taken Daisy “to France for a year” (77)? As Tom Buchanan pulls away from George Wilson’s gas station, Nick states, “There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind” (125). Whom does Nick view as having a “simple mind” (125)? What is distinctive about the “confusion” of a simple mind?

IV. The Accident

7. When Tom and Gatsby are arguing, Nick suddenly remembers that it is his birthday and that he has just turned thirty. Realizing that his thirties will bring a “thinning list” of friends and “thinning hair,” Nick is not initially enthusiastic about the “menacing road of a new decade” (135). Yet as Jordan rests her head upon his shoulder, Nick feels reassured and concludes, “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight” (136). What is ironic about that sentence?

8. Toward the end of Chapter Seven, readers learn that Myrtle Wilson ran out into the road and was “instantly killed” (13)? How was Myrtle killed? Who is responsible for her death? Why might Fitzgerald describe Myrtle’s “left breast” as “swinging loose like a flap” such that there was “no need to listen for the heart beneath” (137)? How is this automobile accident similar to and/or different from accidents described in previous chapters?

9. When Nick asks whether Daisy was driving the car that killed Myrtle, Gatsby answers, “Yes, [. . .] but of course I’ll say I was” (143). And at the very end of the chapter, Gatsby stands alone in what’s described as a “sacred [. . .] vigil” outside the Buchanans’ house, ready to intervene if anything should happen to Daisy. Why might Fitzgerald depict Gatsby as being willing to sacrifice himself in order to relieve others from paying for their sins? Does his willingness to sacrifice himself make Gatsby a more sympathetic and likeable character? Does the author construct his title character as a Christ figure? Why or why not?

Homework- Finish the book!

Friday

APLAC Rhetorical Analysis Day