Gatsby resolves to take the blame for the incident and still believes that Daisy will leave Tom for him. During Chapter 8 , Gatsby confides in Nick about his past, the true story this time. At the end of Chapter 8, Gatsby is shot and killed by George Wilson, who believes Gatsby killed Myrtle and was the one sleeping with her.
Meanwhile, Daisy and Tom have left town to avoid the repercussions of Myrtle's death. In Chapter 9 , Gatsby's funeral is sparsely attended, despite Nick's efforts to invite people. Gatsby's father does make an appearance, sharing some details about young Jay's early ambition and focus.
Nick leaves New York shortly after, disenchanted with life on the east coast. Thus Gatsby's actual death has caused Nick's metaphorical death of leaving New York forever. Gatsby adopts this catchphrase, which was used among wealthy people in England and America at the time, to help build up his image as a man from old money, which is related to his frequent insistence he is "an Oxford man.
In this moment, Nick begins to believe and appreciate Gatsby, and not just see him as a puffed-up fraud. The medal, to Nick, is hard proof that Gatsby did, in fact, have a successful career as an officer during the war and therefore that some of Gatsby's other claims might be true. For the reader, the medal serves as questionable evidence that Gatsby really is an "extraordinary" man—isn't it a strange that Gatsby has to produce physical evidence to get Nick to buy his story?
Imagine how strange it would be to carry around a physical token to show to strangers to prove your biggest achievement. He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity.
Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock. In Chapter 5, the dream Gatsby has been working towards for years—to meet and impress Daisy with his fabulous wealth—finally begins to come to fruition. And so, for the first time, we see Gatsby's genuine emotions, rather than his carefully-constructed persona. Nick finds these emotions almost as beautiful and transformative as Gatsby's smile, though there's also the sense that this love could quickly veer off the rails: Gatsby is running down "like an overwound clock.
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. This is probably Gatsby's single most famous line. His insistence that he can repeat the past and recreate everything as it was in Louisville sums up his intense determination to win Daisy back at any cost.
This is the moment Gatsby lays his cards out on the table, so to speak—he risks everything to try and win over Daisy. His insistence that Daisy never loved Tom also reveals how Gatsby refuses to acknowledge Daisy could have changed or loved anyone else since they were together in Louisville.
Especially since Daisy can't support this statement, saying that she loved both Tom and Gatsby, and Tom quickly seizes power over the situation by practically ordering Gatsby and Daisy to drive home together, Gatsby's confident insistence that Daisy has only ever loved him feels desperate, even delusional.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. And one fine morning One of the most famous ending lines in modern literature, this quote is Nick's final analysis of Gatsby—someone who believed in "the green light, the orgastic future" that he could never really attain.
Our last image of Gatsby is of a man who believed in a world and a future that was better than the one he found himself in—but you can read more about interpretations of the ending, both optimistic and pessimistic, in our guide to the end of the book. If you read The Great Gatsby , odds are you will have to write at least one paper that analyzes Gatsby as a character or connects him to a larger theme, like money, love, or the American Dream. To do this well, you should closely read Gatsby's key scenes meeting Daisy again in Chapter 5, the confrontation in the hotel in Chapter 7, his decision to take the blame in Chapter 8 along with his background, revealed over Chapters 6, 8, and 9.
By understanding both Gatsby's past and his present in the novel, you can write about him confidently despite his many-layered personality.
It can be helpful to compare Gatsby to other characters, because it can make it easier to understand his attitude and motivations. You should also consider how Gatsby's interaction with the book's famous symbols especially the green light reveal aspects of his character. Remember that there are many valid ways to interpret Gatsby, as he is a very complex, mysterious character. As long as you back up your arguments with evidence from the book you can connect Gatsby to various big-picture themes and ideas.
We will explore that in action below with some common essay topics about Gatsby. I think the best way to tackle this question is to ask " why is Gatsby called great " or " who thinks Gatsby is great? Remember that the book is narrated by Nick Carraway, and all of our impressions of the characters come from his point of view.
So the real question is "why does Nick Carraway think Gatsby is great? And the answer to that comes from Gatsby's outlook and hope, not his money or extravagance, which are in fact everything that Nick claims to despise. Nick admires Gatsby due to his optimism, how he shapes his own life, and how doggedly he believes in his dream, despite the cruel realities of s America.
So Gatsby's greatness comes from his outlook—even if, to many readers, Gatsby's steadfast belief in Daisy's love and his own almost god-like abilities come off as delusional. Gatsby is not so much obsessed with repeating the past as reclaiming it. He wants to both return to that beautiful, perfect moment when he wedded all of his hopes and dreams to Daisy in Louisville, and also to make that past moment his present and future!
It also means getting right what he couldn't get right the first time by winning Daisy over. So Gatsby's obsession with the past is about control—over his own life, over Daisy—as much as it is about love. Even after he's managed to amass great wealth, Gatsby still searches for control over his life in other ways. Perhaps he fixates on the reclamation of that moment in his past because by winning over Daisy, he can finally achieve each of the dreams he imagined as a young man.
The Great Gatsby would probably be much less memorable, first of all! Sad endings tend to stick in your mind more stubbornly than happy ones.
Furthermore, the novel would lose its power as a reflection on the American Dream -- if Gatsby ended up with Daisy, the book would be a straightforward rags-to-riches American Dream success story. In order to be critical of the American Dream, Gatsby has to lose everything he's gained.
The novel would also lose its power as an indictment of class in America, since if Daisy and Gatsby ended up together it would suggest walls coming down between old and new money, something that never happens in the book. Instead, the novel depicts class as a rigid and insurmountable barrier in s America. A happy ending would also seem to reward both Gatsby's bad behavior including crime, dishonesty, and cheating as well as Daisy's cheating, killing Myrtle. This would change the tone of the ending, since Gatsby's tragic death seems to outweigh any of his crimes in Nick's eyes.
Also, Gatsby likely wouldn't have caught on as an American classic during the ultra-conservative s had its ending appeared to endorse behavior like cheating, crime, and murder. In short, although on your first read of the novel you more than likely are hoping for Gatsby to succeed in winning over Daisy, the novel would be much less powerful with a stereotypically happy ending.
There is a bit of a progression in how the reader regards the American Dream in the course of the novel, which moves in roughly three stages and corresponds to what we know about Jay Gatsby. First, the novel expresses a cautious belief in the American Dream. Gatsby's parties are lavish, Nick rides over the Queensboro bridge with optimism and the belief that anything can happen in New York 4.
However, this optimism quickly gives way to skepticism. As you learn more about Gatsby's background and likely criminal ties in the middle-to-late chapters , combined with how broken George seems in Chapter 7 upon learning of his wife's affair, it seems like the lavish promises of the American Dream we saw in the earlier half of the book are turning out to be hollow, at best. This skepticism gives way to pessimism by the end of the novel.
With Gatsby dead, along with George and Myrtle, and only the rich alive, the novel has progressed to a charged, emotional critique of the American Dream. After all, how can you believe in the American Dream in a world where the strivers end up dead and those born into money literally get away with murder? Tredell, Nicolas, ed. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby. Columbia Critical Guides. New York: Columbia University Press.
ISSN Cambridge University Press. The New York Times. Retrieved 29 July He had begun to plan the novel in June, , saying to Maxwell Perkins, 'I want to write something new — something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned. A Historical Guide to F. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 11 October The failure of The Vegetable in the fall of caused Fitzgerald, who was by then in considerable debt, to shut himself in a stuffy room over a garage in Great Neck, New York , and write himself out of the red by turning out ten short stories for the magazine market.
Retrieved 12 May Turnbull, Andrew, ed. The Letters of F. Charles Scribner's Sons. Cover Design by Dennis M. Retrieved 27 July He produces 18, words; most of this material is later discarded, but he salvages the short story "Absolution," published in June College Literature 1 1 : The New York Review of Books. He may have been remembering Fitzgerald's words in that April letter: So in my new novel I'm thrown directly on purely creative work—not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world.
London Review of Books 22 18 : 13— Retrieved 24 February Critical Companion to F. Infobase Publishing. Scott Fitzgerald's ledger". University of South Carolina. Retrieved 29 April Scott Fitzgerald, Handwritten by Fitzgerald". The Atlantic Wire. The Atlantic Media Company. Princeton University Library Chronicle 53 2 : — We are left then with the enticing possibility that Fitzgerald's arresting image was originally prompted by Cugat's fantastic apparitions over the valley of ashes ; in other words, that the author derived his inventive metamorphosis from a recurrent theme of Cugat's trial jackets, one which the artist himself was to reinterpret and transform through subsequent drafts.
A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner. Studio Retrieved 22 May And, uh, he in the end didn't think that The Great Gatsby was a very good title, was dissatisfied with it. The Economist. Retrieved 27 March A week later, in his next letter, he was floundering: 'I have not decided to stick to the title I put on the book, Trimalchio in West Egg.
Speed; Burns, Edward M. University of Michigan Press. Trimalchio in West Egg. Kuehl, John; Bryer, Jackson R. Macmillan Publishing Company. When Ring Lardner came in the other day I told him about your novel and he instantly balked at the title. Retrieved 6 May However, nearing the time of publication, Fitzgerald, who despised the title The Great Gatsby and toiled for months to think of something else, wrote to Perkins that he had finally found one: Under the Red, White, and Blue.
Unfortunately, it was too late to change. The Guardian. At the last minute, he had asked his editor if they could change the new novel's title to Under the Red, White and Blue , but it was too late. Scott Fitzgerald: Voice of the Jazz Age. Twenty-First Century Books. When the book was published on April 10, , the critics raved. The Huffington Post. Luhrmann was also interested in Trimalchio , the early version of The Great Gatsby that I published in as a volume in the Cambridge Edition.
The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 3 July Retrieved 11 July Gatsby comes across as more confident and aggressive in 'Trimalchio' during a confrontation with romantic rival Tom Buchanan at the Plaza Hotel, challenging Tom's assertion that Gatsby and Daisy's affair is 'a harmless little flirtation.
New York: Scribner, Boston Globe. Retrieved 5 May Lost City: Fitzgerald's New York 1st paperback ed. Retrieved 21 May Retrieved 11 May The New York Post. New York Herald Tribune. The Chicago Daily Tribune. Scott Fitzgerald". The Dallas Morning News. The Times-Picayune. Louis Post-Dispatch. Scott Fitzgerald Ventures". New York Evening World. The Star. USA Today. New York Times. Retrieved 30 August The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.
Writers like John O'Hara were showing its influence and younger men like Edward Newhouse and Budd Schulberg, who would presently be deeply affected by it, were discovering it. The Saturday Evening Post. Books in Action: the Armed Services Editions. Washington: Library of Congress. One hundred fifty-five thousand ASE copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed-as against the twenty-five thousand copies of the novel printed by Scribners between and The Denver Post.
Ace your assignments with our guide to The Great Gatsby! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. How does Nick Carraway first meet Jay Gatsby? Why did Daisy marry Tom? Why does Gatsby arrange for Nick to have lunch with Jordan Baker? How does Tom find out about the affair between Gatsby and Daisy? How does Gatsby make his money? How are West Egg and East Egg different? What is the importance of the character Owl Eyes? Does Daisy love Gatsby or Tom?
Why does Tom insist on switching cars with Gatsby when they go to the city? Why is Nick the narrator of the story?
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