The Great Gatsby

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is short, which makes students underestimate it. Nearly every sentence is doing two jobs at once, and the examiner is looking for answers that notice the second one.

The novel was published in 1925 and is set in the summer of 1922, on Long Island and in New York City, during the boom years between the war and the Wall Street crash. Prohibition has made bootleggers rich, money is moving faster than manners can follow, and the people with the newest fortunes still cannot buy their way into the oldest houses.

It is on the comparative list for 2027 and 2028 and works in every mode, but it is strongest on Cultural Context and on Theme or Issue, because the divide between old money and new money is built into the geography of the book before a single character speaks.

The Great Gatsby: The Story in Five Beats

One. Nick Carraway, a young bond salesman from the Midwest, rents a small house in West Egg, the less fashionable of two peninsulas. His neighbour throws enormous parties. Across the bay in East Egg live his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan, who is wealthy, athletic and openly unfaithful.

Two. Nick is dragged into Tom’s other life, meeting his mistress Myrtle Wilson, wife of a garage owner in the ash heaps between the eggs and the city. The afternoon ends with Tom breaking Myrtle’s nose for saying Daisy’s name.

Three. Nick finally meets his neighbour, Jay Gatsby, and learns the reason for the parties. Gatsby loved Daisy five years earlier, before the war and before he had money, and he bought the house across the water from hers on purpose. Nick arranges a reunion over tea.

Four. The affair goes well until Gatsby pushes for more than Daisy can give. In a hotel suite in the heat of a New York afternoon, Tom exposes where Gatsby’s money came from, and Daisy’s nerve fails. Driving home, Daisy hits and kills Myrtle. Gatsby lets everyone believe he was driving.

Five. George Wilson, told by Tom whose car it was, shoots Gatsby in his swimming pool and then himself. Almost nobody comes to the funeral. Nick, sickened, goes back west, and the novel ends with him alone on Gatsby’s beach.

The Dream That Was Never Available

Gatsby is not chasing money. He has money by the time we meet him. He is chasing a version of himself that a girl once fell in love with, and he genuinely believes that enough effort can wind the clock back.

“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”Jay Gatsby, Chapter 6

Fitzgerald keeps the ambition and the impossibility in the same sentence. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is the clearest example: it works as a target only while it stays out of reach, and the night Gatsby finally holds Daisy’s hand on his lawn it stops being magic and becomes a light on a dock. That reversal is the whole tragedy in miniature.

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

Old Money, New Money, No Money

The novel sorts everyone by where their money came from and how long they have had it. East Egg is inherited, West Egg is earned, and the valley of ashes is where the people who serve both live. Tom’s contempt for Gatsby is never really about the affair. It is about a man from nowhere buying a house in his eye line.

“Her voice is full of money.”Jay Gatsby, Chapter 7

That line is the best single quote on the course for wealth as a personal quality rather than a bank balance. Daisy sounds expensive. Gatsby hears it before Nick can name it.

The cost of all this falls on the people with the least. Myrtle wants out of the garage badly enough to take the humiliation that comes with Tom, and it kills her. George is the only character who works with his hands and the only one who ends up doing the killing.

Carelessness as a Class Habit

Tom and Daisy are not villains in the melodramatic sense. They are careless, which the novel treats as worse. They smash things and people, and then retreat behind their money and let other people clean up.

“Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 2

Notice the flatness of that sentence. No outrage, no adverb doing the work for us. Fitzgerald reports the violence the way Tom’s world would: efficiently, and then on to the next drink. In an essay this is stronger evidence than any speech Tom makes, because it shows rather than argues.

Who’s Who

Jay Gatsby was born James Gatz to poor farmers in North Dakota and invented himself at seventeen. His fortune comes from bootlegging and worse, through Meyer Wolfshiem. Nick disapproves of everything about him and still says the only kind thing anyone says to him all summer.

“You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 8

Daisy Buchanan is charming, funny and evasive. Her line about her baby daughter is the closest she comes to saying what she has understood about her own life.

“the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool”Daisy Buchanan, Chapter 1

Tom Buchanan is old money, ex-Yale footballer, racist, and physically enormous. He is the only character who wins.

Nick Carraway narrates, claims he is one of the few honest people he has ever known, and is not quite reliable. Watch how often his judgements arrive two chapters after the events that should have prompted them.

Myrtle and George Wilson live under the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, a faded oculist’s billboard that George mistakes for God watching. It is the novel’s clearest symbol and the easiest one to over-explain, so keep your point short.

How Gatsby Is Examined

For Cultural Context, the strongest ground is class mobility: who can move, who cannot, and what happens to those who try. For Theme or Issue, the dream and its cost is the obvious route, but ambition, love and self-invention all work. For General Vision and Viewpoint on the 2027 course, the ending is bleak but the narration is affectionate, and the best answers hold both.

Whatever the mode, tie your points to the geography. West Egg to East Egg to the valley of ashes to the city is a moral map as much as a physical one.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Pick moments that carry more than one idea. The tea at Nick’s cottage, the hotel suite in the heat, and the empty funeral will cover most questions between them. Each one shows class, love and self-deception at the same time, so you can pivot in whichever direction the question wants without changing your evidence. Keep quotations to a line and spend the space on the comparison.

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