TGG

Question 1

‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ (Chapter 9)

Answer 1

• The beautiful poetry of the ending highlights how humans, in attempting to shape time to achieve their dreams and ambitions, are unable to outmanoeuvre the powerful ‘currents’ of history.
• The melancholy tone expresses the inevitability of the enduring spirit of human aspiration (‘so we beat on).
• And yet the alliterative plosives of ‘beat…boat…borne…back’ - which seem to mimic the sound of the waves slapping us down to our mundane reality - suggests the unfeasibility of achieving our goals.

Question 2

“I was within and without” (chapter 2)

Answer 2

• Nick recognises his paradoxical fascination with the vulgar excesses of thedecaying American dream.
• Within and without nods to Nick’s liminal state. Constantly present to observe the hedonistic gatherings but considered an outsider by the West egg aristocracy, Nick offers a perceptive take on the alluring but disturbing indulgences he witnesses.

Question 3

‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money…’ (Chapter 9)

Answer 3

Nick
- best summarises how wealth can corrupt individuals to the extent that their default mode becomes moral emptiness.

• Links to Daisy’s ‘voice full of money’ where Fitzgerald’s use of synaesthesia - a key device in the novel - amplifies the couple’s privilege and sense of wealth-fuelled entitlement.

Question 4

‘that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool’ (Chapter 1)

Answer 4

Daisy
- Epitomising Daisy’s hyperbolic and knowing shallowness, the superlative ‘best’ and juxtaposition ‘beautiful..fool’ sum up Daisy’s cynical submission to 1920s feminine norms through the proxy of her daughter.

Question 5

‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’ (Chapter 8)

Answer 5

Nick
- Carraway is so repulsed by the moral vacuum behind the façade of decency and elegance that he becomes increasingly candid about his feelings for the ‘crowd’.

• ironically, he is still drawn to Gatsby, a character whose lifestyle is funded by the immorality of bootlegging.