The Great Gatsby Flashcards
What suggests Daisy and Tom are part of a higher society?
Daisy: ‘had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged’.
What are the people of the valley of ashes described as?
‘ash grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air’.
How does new money challenge traditional means of acquiring wealth?
‘Young men didn’t drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island.’
What describes the livelihood and expeditiousness of Daisy and Tom’s life?
‘They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild. But she came out with a perfect reputation’.
What shows the dichotomy between old money and new money?
‘She was appalled by West Egg, appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms’
What does Tom perceive the newly rich people to be?
‘A lot of these newly rick people are just big bootleggers’.
How does TOm refuse to accept the legitimacy of the Noveau Riche?
-‘I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr Nobody from nowhere make love to your wife’. ‘I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door’.
How does Gatsby attempt to transcend the social confines of his class?
He dissociates himself with ‘his parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all’.
How does Gatsby reinvent himself?
‘He invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.’
What makes Myrtle disregard Wilson’s integration into society?
He ‘borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in’.
How does Daisy’s admiration of Gatsby’s house increase its value?
‘He revaluated everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well loved eyes’.
What shows how emotionally and mentally invested Gatsby is in his dream?
‘He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could come over some afternoon to a stranger’s garden’.
What shows that the expectations of dream surpasses the reality and the fact that Gatsby is so disenchanted.
‘There must have been moments when Daisy tumbled short o his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion’.
What shows how Gatsby has been internalising his desire for Daisy?
‘No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart’.
What shows the fantastical, exhilarating nature of dreams?
‘Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with oblivious embrace.’
How do dreams also present a disconnectedness with reality?
‘For while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality’. ‘He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: I never loved you’ after she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken.
What shows that Gatsby’s dream for Daisy stems from a lack of fulfillment in his life?
‘He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps that had gone into loving Daisy’
