Gatsby believes Daisy will leave Tom, and is clearly nonplussed when she loses her resolve in the hotel room. Why doesn’t she leave Tom? Why did Gatsby fail to anticipate her actions? What does Tom understand that Gatsby does not?
Here’s a short question with a potentially long answer: Who is responsible for Myrtle Wilson’s death?
America, it used to be said, is a place where a man (and perhaps a woman, but this is less certain) can completely reinvent himself. James Gatz initially seems a perfect example of this. Yet Fitzgerald appears to question whether such reinvention is really possible. In what ways do Gatsby’s origins as Gatz betray him?
Given the concept of hamartia that we have discussed this semester in mind, is The Great Gatsby a tragic novel? Is Jay Gatsby a tragic figure? What, then, is his tragic flaw or what error does he make?
Now that you’ve seen his dead body floating on an air mattress in his pool, what do you make of Nick’s assertion at the beginning of the novel that “Gatsby turned out all right at the end”?
Who is responsible for Jay Gatsby’s death, and why?
Two symbols that have recurred throughout the novel are given final meaning in these last two chapters: the billboard of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and the green light on the end of the Buchanans’ dock. What is the significance of each?
Some literary critics have argued that one of this novel’s key themes centers on the regional differences between different parts of the Unitied States. As Nick himself points out, he and Gatsby are from the midwest (Carraway, like Fitzgerald, from Minnesota, Gatsby from North Dakota), Daisy and Tom are from the south, and they all end up in the northeast. If you think this is important, what message should we take from it?
Gatsby is dead, but Nick survives, and indeed seems to have been changed by knowing Gatsby. In what way is Nick different now? If the novel has a moral (it may have several), Nick is the one left to speak it. What do you think the moral is? What does the final sentence in the novel (one of the two or three most famous in all of American literature) mean?