The Great Gatsby Theme or Issue

The Great Gatsby · Theme or Issue

The Great Gatsby Theme or Issue is the comparative mode where you follow one idea across your three texts and show what each of them concludes about it. In Gatsby the theme that carries furthest is the dream of remaking yourself, and the price the novel puts on that dream.

What this mode asks of you

Theme or Issue is not a theme essay on one book. You name an idea, you show how it develops in each text, and you keep comparing as you go. The examiner is watching for two things: that the theme you chose is genuinely present in all three texts, and that you can say how the treatment differs, not just that it is similar. Choose a theme wide enough to travel and narrow enough to argue. The Great Gatsby is one of the shortest texts on the comparative course, which makes rereading it with a single theme in mind realistic in a way it is not for a longer novel.

The theme below is the mainstream reading and the one that pairs most easily with other texts: ambition and self-reinvention, and what it costs the people around the person doing the reinventing.

Gatsby’s capacity for hope

Before you see Gatsby do anything, Nick tells you what he thinks of him. That is deliberate. The whole novel is filtered through a narrator who has decided in advance that Gatsby was worth something, and the quality he singles out is hope.

“it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 1

Notice that Nick admires the capacity, not the goal. That distinction is your way into the theme. Gatsby’s wanting is enormous and his object is small, and the gap between those two things is where the novel does its work. When you compare texts, this is the question to carry across: does the text admire the ambition itself, or judge it by what the character actually wants?

The dream narrows to one person

Gatsby has built a fortune, a house and a reputation, and all of it points at a woman across the water. The reunion at Nick’s cottage is the moment the enormous ambition gets reduced to its real size.

“You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”Jay Gatsby, Chapter 5

He says it to Daisy while she is standing in front of him, and once she is there the light stops meaning anything. Fitzgerald puts the loss in Nick’s voice immediately afterwards: the count of enchanted objects goes down by one. For the comparative, that is a precise idea to test against your other texts. When a character finally gets the thing they wanted, does the text let them keep wanting it, or does it take the wanting away?

The self he invented

Halfway through, the novel stops and tells you where Gatsby came from. He was James Gatz, a farmer’s son, and Jay Gatsby is something he made up as a teenager and then committed to completely.

“the truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 6

Self-invention is the most portable version of this theme, because almost every comparative course has a character trying to become someone their circumstances did not intend. What is specific to Gatsby is how total the commitment is. He does not adjust the invented self when it stops working. Compare that with a text where a character can change course, and you have a real comparative point rather than a shared summary.

Where the money came from

The dream needs funding, and the funding is criminal. Tom says so out loud in the Plaza Hotel, in front of Daisy, and the accusation is the thing that finally breaks Gatsby’s hold on her.

“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

This is the point where a Theme or Issue answer gets its edge. The novel does not simply celebrate ambition. It shows that in this society the only route from Gatz to Gatsby ran through crime, and that the people born into money get to be disgusted by the methods they made necessary. Ask the same question of your other texts: what does the society in the text actually allow an ambitious outsider to do?

Who is left to clean up

Two people are dead and the funeral is nearly empty. Nick’s verdict at the end is aimed at Tom and Daisy, and it is the closest the novel comes to a direct moral judgement.

“they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness”Nick Carraway, Chapter 9

Carelessness, not cruelty. That is the charge, and it is worth keeping the word, because it says the damage was not even deliberate enough to be interesting to the people who caused it. Every text that deals with ambition also decides who pays for it, and comparing who is left holding the cost at the end of each of your three texts is one of the most reliable comparative paragraphs available to you.

The Great Gatsby Theme or Issue on Paper 2

The question shape: the Higher Level comparative question on this mode has come in two parts for years. Part (a) asks you to deal with one text on its own, and part (b) asks you to compare the same theme or issue across the other two, with the marks weighted towards the comparison. In 2008 the wording turned on the range of viewpoints a comparative study of a theme or issue gives you. In 2023 it asked how contradictory aspects of human nature emerge from a study of a theme or issue, and a second question that year asked you to compare how ethical questions are treated. The pattern to prepare for is a statement about your chosen theme that you have to test, not a request to describe it. Prepare the theme, not the question, and be ready to bend the same material to whatever the statement claims.

The short version

For The Great Gatsby Theme or Issue, take ambition and self-reinvention as your theme, and treat Gatsby as the text that pushes it furthest: a man who invents himself completely, funds it criminally, aims it at one person, and is abandoned by everyone when it fails. Track five moments and you have the text covered for this mode: Nick’s opening judgement, the reunion at the cottage, the revelation of James Gatz, the confrontation in the Plaza, and the empty funeral. The last line tells you what Fitzgerald concluded about the whole business.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 9

Keep going with The Great Gatsby