Final Set of Gatsby Prompts

1. When Nick sees Jordan for the last time, she challenges his honesty. Has he been dishonest with her? What does Jordan mean that they are both “bad drivers”? Relatedly, is Nick’s decision to go back west an honest one that reflects maturity, or is he (perhaps like Gatsby) trying to reclaim the past? (or both, or neither).

2. Now that you have finished the novel, how would you describe Nick’s relationship with Gatsby? Why does he try so hard to get people to Gatsby’s funeral? Why does he wipe the swear word from Gatsby’s porch? When Nick tells Gatsby’s father, “We were close friends,” does this ring true to you? Is that how you think of Gatsby and Nick? Explain.

3. The last thing Nick says to Gatsby is, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” If Nick, as he asserts immediately after relating this, “disapproved of [Gatsby] from beginning to end,” why does he say this to him? Is he lying?

4. Nick wonders if Gatsby ever awoke from his dream. If so, Nick surmises, Gatsby “must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.” Do you think Gatsby ever comes to these types of realizations? Does he ever escape his dreams and see the reality of his situation and the cost of his choices? Or does he die a dreamer, unwilling to compromise or relinquish his ideals?

5. Interpret one of these two passages:

“And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

See you on Thursday.