The Great Gatsby

Characters
1. Nick Carraway
  1. NARRATOR 'first person participatory narration'
2. Jay Gatsby (James Gatz)
3. Daisy Buchanan
4. Tom Buchanan
5. Jordan Baker
6. Myrtle Wilson
7. George Wilson
8. Owl Eyes
9. Klipspringer
10. Meyer Wolfsheim
Purple = Old Money Blue = New Money Pink = No Money
Context
1. F. Scott Fitzgerald
  1. Wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, inspiration for Daisy Buchanan
  2. like Nick, Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised.
2. 1920s America
  1. Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz Age.” Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation.
  2. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers, and an underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police notice, and “speakeasies”—secret clubs that sold liquor—thrived.
  3. The chaos and violence of World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and extravagant living to compensate. The staid conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade were turned on their ear, as money, opulence, and exuberance became the order of the day.
Themes
1. The Decline of The American Dream in the 1920s
2. The Hallowness of the Upper Class
Motifs
1. Geography
2. Weather
Symbols
1. The Green Light
2. The Valley of Ashes
3. The Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg
Important Quotations
1. "I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." - Daisy Buchanan
2. "He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself." - Nick Carraway
3. "The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end." - Nick Carraway
4. "That’s my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. . . . I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life." - Nick Carraway
5. "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 then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - Nick Carraway

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The Great Gatsby

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