Gatsby Critics

Question 1

Kathleen Parkinson

Answer 1

Myrtle being hit with the car by Daisy is “Symbolic rape”

Question 2

Toby Tanner

Answer 2

“The green light offers Gatsby a suitably inaccessible focus for his yearning”

Question 3

Jerome Mandel

Answer 3

Tom and Daisy are “royalty, completely distanced and insulated from ordinary human concerns”.

Question 4

William Rose Bennet

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Claire Stocks

Answer 5

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

Question 6

A.E. Dyson

Answer 6

“Tom’s restlessness is an arrogant assertiveness seeking to evade in bluster the deep uneasiness of self-knowledge.”

Question 7

Sarah Beede Fryer

Answer 7

“She does feel, she has suffered, and her desire for her daughter to be a ‘fool’ is actually a desire to shelter her from experience the pain that Daisy herself has known”.

Question 8

Anne O’Neill

Answer 8

“Nick, like Gatsby, is an outsider, an éntranger among the wealthy Long Island.”

Question 9

Tredell

Answer 9

“Money cannot buy Gatsby access to the class that Tom Buchanan inhabits.”

Question 10

Parkinson

Answer 10

Claims the valley of ashes to be “a recurrent symbol of social and personal…despair.”