The Journal
Book club discussion questions for The Great Gatsby
These discussion questions for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby are designed to open up the novel's deepest arguments rather than rehearse its plot. Gatsby rewards multiple readings precisely because readers disagree about its central figure -- whether he is a romantic idealist, a fraud, a victim, or all three.
The Great Gatsby is free to read on Foxing. For the chapter-by-chapter reading format that works well with this novel, how to run a book club chapter-by-chapter covers the method.
Questions about Gatsby#
1. Is Gatsby admirable? His dream is an illusion, his money is illegally obtained, his self-invention is total. And yet Fitzgerald gives him the most charged prose in the novel. Does the quality of Fitzgerald's admiration for Gatsby change your own?
2. Nick says at the end that Gatsby believed in "the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us." Is this the American Dream as Fitzgerald understands it -- structurally impossible to achieve? Or is Gatsby's version of the dream specifically flawed? For what the green light represents in full, that analysis covers the symbol in detail.
3. Gatsby has reinvented himself completely -- new name, new history, new voice, new house. What does the novel suggest about the authenticity of self-invention? Is there a "real" Gatsby beneath the invented one?
Questions about Nick#
4. Nick declares in the opening paragraph that he is "one of the few honest people" he has ever known. By the end of the novel, does this claim hold up? What does Nick conceal, omit, or misrepresent?
5. Nick is in love with the world he describes -- the parties, the lights, the wealth -- at the same time as he is disgusted by it. How does Fitzgerald manage this double attitude through Nick's narration?
6. Nick is the novel's moral centre, but he is also the person who facilitates Gatsby's obsession by arranging the reunion with Daisy. Is he complicit in what follows?
Questions about the novel's world#
7. The novel divides its world into East Egg (old money), West Egg (new money), the Valley of Ashes (the waste produced by wealth), and New York City (freedom from social constraint). Does this geography feel accurate to class dynamics you recognise in the present?
8. Tom Buchanan is described as physically overwhelming, socially dominant, and casually racist. He is also the person who survives the novel's catastrophe with nothing lost. What is Fitzgerald saying about that?
9. Myrtle Wilson and George Wilson -- the occupants of the Valley of Ashes -- die as a result of the carelessness of the wealthy characters. Nick says that Tom and Daisy "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money." Is this the novel's central moral judgment?
Questions about the novel's meaning#
10. The novel's final lines -- "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" -- are among the most quoted in American literature. What do they mean? Is this elegiac, despairing, or something else?
11. Fitzgerald was in his late twenties when he wrote Gatsby and had already lived a version of the life he was describing. For the biographical context, that piece covers how closely he resembled his own characters. Does knowing his biography change how you read the novel?
12. If the novel is a critique of the American Dream, is it also nostalgic for it? Can both be true?
Further reading#
For the symbolic analyses that complement these questions, the green light and the parties are the critical companions.
For other discussion questions in the same format, Frankenstein questions and Pride and Prejudice questions follow the same structure.