The Great Gatsby · F. Scott Fitzgerald
Essay Questions
2 min readPrompts for essays, seminars, and exam practice. Each pairs a question with a brief note on what a strong response might weigh — use them as starting angles, not answers.
Analytical essays
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"The Great Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream, not a celebration of it." Evaluate this claim using Gatsby's rise and fall. Consider: whether the novel condemns the dream itself or the society that rigs it.
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Analyze the significance of the green light across the novel, from Chapter 1 to the final page. Consider: how a private symbol for Daisy becomes a national symbol for desire.
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How does Fitzgerald use the valley of ashes and the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg to develop the novel's moral vision? Consider: what lies beneath the wealth of the Eggs, and what has replaced God in this world.
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Discuss Gatsby's belief that one can repeat the past. Is his struggle against time noble, delusional, or both? Consider: the clocks, seasons, and backward-looking structure of the narration.
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Character and narration
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How reliable is Nick Carraway as a narrator? Consider: the gap between what he claims about his own honesty and what he actually does and reveals.
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Is Gatsby "great"? Weigh Nick's admiration against the criminal and self-deceiving facts of Gatsby's life. Consider: whose judgment the title ultimately expresses.
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Compare Tom and Gatsby as rivals for Daisy. What does Daisy's final choice reveal about the novel's view of class? Consider: old money versus new, and the door money cannot open.
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Examine the women of the novel — Daisy, Jordan, and Myrtle. What possibilities and limits does each face? Consider: Daisy's wish that her daughter be "a beautiful little fool."
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Wider connections
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To what extent is Gatsby a product of its historical moment — Prohibition, the Jazz Age, the boom before the crash — and to what extent does it speak beyond it? Consider: what makes the novel feel more accurate a century later.
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Read The Great Gatsby as a work of modernism alongside Eliot's The Waste Land. How do fragmentation, disillusion, and ash-gray imagery shape its meaning? Consider: the aftermath of the First World War and the search for meaning in a commercialized world.
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