Critics

Question 1

H.L. Mencken, 1925

Answer 1

“Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes”.

Question 2

Kenneth Eble, 1964

Answer 2

“Daisy moves away from actuality into an idea existing in Gatsby’s mind”.

Question 3

Thomas Flanagan, 2000

Answer 3

> “Gatsby lives in the world of romantic energies and colors”.
AND
“Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him his outlines are dim”.

Question 4

Jacqueline Lance, 2000

Answer 4

“Becoming Tom was Gatsby’s dream”.

Question 5

Claire Stocks, 2007

Answer 5

“Nick wants to portray Gatsby as ‘great’ and undermines anything that might undermine that image”.

Question 6

Marius Bewley

Answer 6

“Daisy has monstrous moral indifference and vicious emptiness”.

Question 7

A.E. Dyson

Answer 7

“In one sense Gatsby is the apotheosis of his rootless society… He believes in himself and his illusions”.

Question 8

Judith Fetterley

Answer 8

“Gatsby’s romanticism of Daisy is heroic though misguided”.

Question 9

K. Fraser

Answer 9

“Daisy is torn between a desire for personal freedom and the need for stability”.

Question 10

Lev Grossman

Answer 10

“Gatsby lays bare the empty, tragic heart of the self-made man”.

Question 11

Alfred Kazin

Answer 11

“Daisy is vulgar and inhuman”

Question 12

A. License

Answer 12

“Gatsby is a martyr of a materialistic society”

Question 13

K. Parkinson

Answer 13

“Daisy is only allowed to exist in the images of men create of her”.

Question 14

Christine Ramos

Answer 14

“By attempting to maintain his way of life, Tom has reduced whole people to ashes without any thought of consequences”.

Question 15

P. Staveley

Answer 15

“Gatsby, life America itself … strives to reach a place he has created in his own mind, an impossible perfect”.

Question 16

1) Isabel Paterson, 1925

Answer 16

“…a man from nowhere, without roots or background, absolutely self-made in the image of an obscure and undefined ideal”

Question 17

2) Isabel Paterson, 1925

Answer 17

“…an incurable romanticist… his mistake was to accept life at its face value”.

Question 18

Carl Von Veehten, 1925

Answer 18

“…a solid or rather cheap personality transfigured and rendered pathetically appealing through the possession of a passionate idealism”

Question 19

Susan Resneck

Answer 19

“The dilemma that Nick, Daisy and Gatsby face is, of course, a human one as well as an American one: whether to embrace the dreams of youth and keep alive the hopes bred in innocence or to face the reality that such dreams are inevitably elusive and illusory because they are part of the past”.

Question 20

Fredrick Jameson

Answer 20

“…in the commodity age need as a purely material and physical impulse has given way to a structure of artificial stimuli, artificial longings, such that it is no longer possible to separate the true from the false, the primary from the luxury - satisfaction, in them”

Question 21

Leland S Person

Answer 21

“[Daisy] seems able to transform the material world into some ephemeral dreamland in which objects suddenly glow with symbolic meaning”.