The Great Gatsby Study Guide

The Great Gatsby · Study Guide

The Great Gatsby study guide below covers four things: how the novel is examined at Leaving Cert, what you need to know cold, the five moments an examiner expects you to be able to use, and where marks quietly disappear. It is for you if you are preparing Fitzgerald’s novel as a comparative text at Higher Level, or starting the book late and needing an order to work in.

How this novel is examined

Gatsby sits on the comparative course for both 2027 and 2028, so you meet it inside a mode rather than on its own: Theme or Issue, Cultural Context, General Vision and Viewpoint or Literary Genre, depending on the modes set for your year. At Higher Level the question comes in two parts: part (a) on one text for roughly 30 marks, part (b) comparing your other two for roughly 40 marks. The Great Gatsby study guide you build has to serve both halves: the novel needs to stand alone in one answer, then sit beside two other texts without being retold.

The novel also has a long history as a single text, and those past questions are the clearest evidence of what examiners want. Papers have asked whether the world of the novel is not admirable although aspects of it are attractive, and how greatly you are influenced by the narrator Nick Carraway (2013); about the friendship between Nick and Gatsby as both intimate and complex, and about being attracted to the idealism while repelled by the corruption (2015); about the traits in Daisy and Gatsby that contribute to the dramatic and tragic aspects of the novel, and about Fitzgerald’s use of contrasts to create an unequal world (2016); whether all the female characters are equally powerless, and whether the novel is a study of selfish individuals that fails to examine society (2017); and whether the portrayal of love and marriage is entirely negative, along with the personal, social and cultural factors influencing character development (2018). Read that list again. Not one asks what happens. Every one asks what you make of it.

The spine of the story, and what each character is for

The plot of The Great Gatsby is short enough to hold in one piece, so hold it. Summer 1922: Nick Carraway rents a cottage in West Egg beside Gatsby’s mansion and dines in East Egg with his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom, who keeps a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, out in the valley of ashes (Chapters 1 to 2). Nick goes to one of Gatsby’s parties, meets the man, and learns from Jordan Baker that the mansion was bought within sight of Daisy’s dock (Chapters 3 to 4). Nick arranges the reunion, the affair restarts, and the novel tells you who Gatsby was before he was Gatsby (Chapters 5 to 6). A confrontation in the Plaza Hotel breaks it open, Tom exposes the bootlegging, and Daisy drives home and kills Myrtle (Chapter 7). Wilson shoots Gatsby in his pool and then himself, almost nobody comes to the funeral, and the Buchanans leave (Chapters 8 to 9).

Then know what each character is for. That is what turns plot into argument. Gatsby is the self-invented man and carries the American Dream. Nick is the filter: everything reaches you already judged. Daisy is the object of the dream and the proof it was aimed at the wrong thing. Tom is power without conscience, old money that never has to explain itself. Myrtle and George Wilson are the people the carelessness lands on. Jordan Baker is dishonesty made fashionable, and your first evidence when a question turns to the women in the novel.

Five moments you should be able to use under pressure

Learn five properly rather than twenty vaguely, and choose ones that work for more than one mode.

The first sight of the green light, Chapter 1. Gatsby is a stranger on his own lawn, reaching towards the water, and Nick has no idea why.

“Involuntarily I glanced seaward-and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 1

Use it for how the novel plants a symbol long before explaining it: the light means nothing yet, which is why it carries so much later.

The reunion at Nick’s cottage, Chapter 5. Gatsby gets what he arranged five years for, and something leaks out of it in the same hour.

“Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 5

This is the most useful moment in the book. Nothing has gone wrong and the loss has already begun: wanting is bigger than having, and the novel says so at its happiest point.

The revelation of James Gatz, Chapter 6. The mystery built since Chapter 3 is answered by a poor boy from a North Dakota farm who renamed himself at seventeen.

“James Gatz-that was really, or at least legally, his name.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 6

Notice the word “legally”. Nick concedes the paperwork and refuses the point: the invented man is the real one. Any answer on identity, self-making or the American Dream begins here.

The confrontation in the Plaza Hotel, Chapter 7. A hot afternoon, a hired suite nobody wanted, and Tom dismantling the invention in front of Daisy.

“He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drugstores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter.”Tom Buchanan, Chapter 7

Gatsby loses Daisy in that room, before anybody dies. Old money does not have to be better than new money. It only has to say where the new money came from.

The funeral, Chapter 9. Set it against the parties of Chapter 3, where strangers arrived uninvited in their hundreds. Nick works the telephone afterwards and collects excuses.

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,”Meyer Wolfshiem, Chapter 9

A decent sentiment doing the work of a locked door. Fitzgerald delivers society’s verdict through an empty graveside rather than a speech, and you should say so.

Where marks go missing on this novel

Four things cost marks here, and all four are avoidable.

The first is retelling. Gatsby has a plot you can narrate comfortably, which makes it tempting, and narration earns close to nothing. The second is treating Nick as a window rather than a character. He is Daisy’s cousin, Gatsby’s friend, the man who covers for both, and he closes Chapter 3 with this.

“I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 3

Take that seriously and half the 2013 question answers itself. The third is writing about the American Dream in the abstract, a paragraph on ambition and money in 1920s America that would survive with the novel shut. Tie it to Gatz’s renaming, to the shirts, to Wolfshiem’s business. The fourth is quoting long and explaining nothing. Four lines of Fitzgerald followed by one sentence saying it shows the theme of wealth is worth less than six words you take apart. Quote short, then work on it.

Using The Great Gatsby study guide in the week before the exam

The Great Gatsby study guide works best in an order, and the order is not the order of the novel. Moments first, position second, writing last.

Revision order: First, learn the five moments above with their chapter numbers, until you can name and place each without checking. Second, take the mode you are sitting, decide your one-line position on the novel, and tag each moment to the part of that position it proves. Third, on the last day, write two part (a) answers against the clock at thirty minutes each, then mark them yourself for one thing: did you argue, or did you tell the story?

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