The Great Gatsby Close Reading Questions



The Great Gatsby Close Reading Questions Name

Consider the following questions as you read the novel. These will serve as a discussion facilitator throughout our study.

Chapter I

1. What yearning is apparent in Nick’s recollection, “When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever”?

2. What is Nick’s attitude toward Gatsby at the beginning of the novel?

3. Why does Nick describe Gatsby as having an “extraordinary gift for hope”?

4. What is Nick’s attitude toward his new life on the East Coast?

5. What is the meaning of Nick’s thought, “And so it happened on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all”

6. How are Daisy and Jordan described when Nick enters the room, and what effect does this have on the reader?

Chapter II

** As you go through this chapter, keep a list of everything you notice that is artificial, fake, unreal, or phony.**

1. What is the tone of the description of the valley of ashes?

2. Why does Fitzgerald include the billboard of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg?

3. How does Myrtle treat her husband?

4. What is the effect on the reader of describing Wilson as coated with “white ashen dust?”

5. How does Myrtle’s behavior change when she changes clothes?

6. What do we learn about Nick when he reflects, “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”?

7. Look at the list of artificial, distorted, decaying or phony things you noticed in this chapter. Why does Fitzgerald spotlight these kinds of behaviors and settings?

Chapter III

1. What is the tone of the first paragraph of chapter 3? How do you know?

2. What is the effect of describing the man in the library as having “enormous owl-eyed spectacles”?

3. How does Gatsby’s smile affect Nick, why does it vanish, and how does Nick regard Gatsby when it does?

4. Why does Fitzgerald portray Gatsby several times in this chapter, standing alone on the porch?

Chapter IV

1. Why has Nick’s first impression of Gatsby—“that he was a person of some undefined consequence”—changed to seeing him as “simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door”?

2. Nick is now “submerged in fascination”; what has brought about the change in his attitude?

3. Why does Gatsby say to Nick, “I’m afraid I made you a little angry this morning in the car, “and how does this simile affect Nick this time?

4. Nick has taken two trips to New York by the end of this chapter, one with Tom in Chapter II and another with Gatsby in this chapter. What are the similarities and differences between the two trips?

Chapter V

1. Why does Fitzgerald begin this chapter with such a startling visual scene but without a sound?

2. Why does Daisy begin to cry and say “They’re such beautiful shirts…It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts before”?

3. Why would the significance of the green light have vanished for Gatsby now?

4. Why does Nick describe Daisy’s voice as “a deathless song”?

Chapter VI

1. What does Nick think that Gatsby “wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you’”?

2. What is the significance of Nick’s comment, “You can’t repeat the past,” and Gatsby’s response, “Why of course you can!”?

3. Why does Gatsby want to defeat the power of time?

4. What does Gatsby mean by the thought, “He could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder”?

Chapter VII

1. What is the mood of the luncheon? How do you know?

2. Why does Nick notice Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes?

3. What does Nick mean by the thought, “…--and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well”?

4. Why does Nick think Tom “[sees] himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization”?

5. Nick, Jordan, and Tom took Gatsby’s yellow car into town; Daisy and Gatsby rode in Gatsby’s blue coupe. Why does Tom tell Daisy to return home with Gatsby in Gatsby’s yellow car, instead of having her return with him?

6. Why does Nick observe that “they were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity”?

7. Why has Nick forgotten that today is his thirtieth birthday?

8. Why do they “[drive] on toward death”?

9. Why does Nick leave Gatsby “watching over nothing”?

Chapter VIII

1. Why does Gatsby feel that “Jay Gatsby had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice”?

2. Why does Nick describe Gatsby’s dream as “incorruptible”?

3. What is the significance of Doctor Eckleberg’s eyes “which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night”?

4. Why does Fitzgerald have Gatsby die in the pool? Why is the description of his death so mild and clean compared with Myrtle’s?

Chapter IX

1. Considering Nick’s ambivalent feelings toward Gatsby, why does he find himself “on Gatsby’s side”? Why is he “alone” in his decision to side with Gatsby?

2. What “quality of distortion” and “haunted” feel does the East have for Nick?

3. Why does Nick say that Tom and Daisy are “careless people”?

4. What is Gatsby’s dream?

5. Why did Gatsby “[believe] in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”?

6. What is the significance of the last line of the novel: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”?

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