Great Gatsby - Themes

American Dream, Opportunity, New York - “anything can happen now we’ve slid over this this bridge”

Fitzgerald suggests this is a land of endless opportunity and possibility - where the American Dream can be made possible for anyone. The ideals of a meritocratic society where hard work can result in change seems possible in the centre of industry, modernization and promise.

American dream, New York, Hedonism - “grotesque” East / “no one cares”

Revelation of the impossibility of the American dream as the lands of the east are not truly a land of promise and possibility but a land of greed, selfishness, capitalism, materialism and hedonism. Reveals the true nature of the American Dream - unattainable. The ideal is impossible and false (just like the facade of Gatsby)

American Dream - “Something gorgeous about” Gatsby

Suggests the admirable qualities of devotion, ambition and romanticism within Gatsby as he is so determined to chase on his dreams

“green light… at the end of a dock”

Class, hardship, struggles - “there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired” / there is no difference “so profound as the difference between the sick and the well” / “cried like a baby” vs “sick”

“A promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing”

“the golden girl” / “Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor”

“her voice is full of money” / “it couldn’t be overdreamed - that voice was a deathless song” / “inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it”

“beautiful little fool”

“careless people” / “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness”

“represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn”

“preyed on Gatsby” / Dan Cody + Wolfishem “left with a singularly appropriate education” / “human molars” as cufflinks / inspired “something sinister” in Gatsby

“James Gatz” Vs “Jay Gatsby” / “didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody” / “platonic conception of himself” / “old sport” / “he had a big future before him”

“shiftless and unsuccessful farm people”

Restlessness - “his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot” / “irrecoverable football game” / Stream on consciousness narration + non-linear chain of events / “smouldering vitality”

“tumbled short of his dreams”

“we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past” / “dead dream fought on”

“A fresh green breast of the new world”

“Nobody came” / “

““He realizes that that his presumptuous little flirtation is over”

“Men and girls went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” /

“absolutely real” - owl-eyed spectacles / “Old sport” / “Mr Nobody from Nowhere”/ “‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice”

“My girl” / “carried her flesh sensuously”

her face had “no facet or gleam of beauty” /  “her left breast was swinging loose like a flap”

“impressive hauteur” / “crowded to the doors” apartment

“spiritless man” / “Wilson had no friend: there was not enough of him for his wife” / “God sees everything”

“Valley of ashes” / “solemn dumping ground” / “Doctor T.J Eckleburg” / “worn-out men”

“Madman”

East Egg VS West

“appalled by it’s raw vigour” / “the rest offended her”