Gatsby Theories And Critics

Question 1

Tyson

Answer 1

A scathing critique of American capitalist culture - The Great Depression, The Great bloom, prohibition etc

Question 2

Sarah Beede Fryer

Answer 2

She does feel, she has suffered and her desire for her daughter to be a fool is actually a desire to shelter her from experiencing the pain that Daisy herself has experienced

Question 3

Anne O’Neill

Answer 3

Nick, like Gatsby, is an outsider, an étranger among the wealthy of Long Island

Question 4

Kathleen Parkinson

Answer 4

Gatsby is a divided personality, ambivalent even in his death

Question 5

Ian and Michelle McMechan

Answer 5

Jordan is not an angel. Ultimately her apparent lack of care for others might make us grow to distrust her at least

Question 6

McMechan

Answer 6

It is difficult to distinguish whether the sourness with which she is characterised comes from Nick, her lover Tom Buchanan or Fitzgerald himself

Question 7

William Rose Bennet (1925)

Answer 7

The queer charm, colour, wonder and drama of a young and reckless world

Question 8

Tony Tanner

Answer 8

Gatsby’s concern with time - it’s repeatability - is obsessive

Question 9

Marius Bewley

Answer 9

An emptiness that we see curdling into the viciousness of a monster plus moral indifference as the story unfolds

Question 10

Edwin Clark (1925)

Answer 10

Fitzgerald discloses in these people a means of spirit, carelessness and absence of loyalties. He cannot hate them, for they are dumb in their selfishness

Question 11

Claire Stocks (2007)

Answer 11

Nick wants to portray Gatsby as ‘great’ and to ignore or edit anything that might undermine that image

Question 12

David O’Rourke

Answer 12

Nick is considered to be quite reliable, basically honest and ultimately changed by his contact with Gatsby