The Great Gatsby Analysis

An owl-eyed man at a Gatsby party sits in awe in the library, murmuring with amazement that all the books on Gatsby’s shelves are "real books." But does Gatsby even read them? The image works...

The story is set in New York City and on Long Island, in two areas known as "West Egg" and "East Egg." The story is set in the early 1920s, just after World War I, during Prohibition, a time period...

The story is told in the first person, through the eyes of Nick Carraway. The primary and most visible story is about Jay Gatsby and his devotion to his dream. Other stories, also told through Carr...

Almost anything on the Shmoop module list would probably fit under the category of "literary fiction": it's an umbrella term for a story or novel that focuses more on character development and styl...

Nick is one cynical little cookie. Even though Nick reserves explicit judgment on the characters, Fitzgerald still manages to implicitly criticize through his narrator's tone. (Think about how ludi...

Hold on to your hats, Shmoopsters, because once you ride the Fitzgerald train, there’s no stopping. You will be hurdling through this plot faster than you can say “T.J. Eckleburg.”...

For such a short title, The Great Gatsby can be interpreted in a couple different ways. Is Gatsby great? Or is Fitzgerald being ironic? Let’s break it down.The way we see it, there are three...

"Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!" – Thomas Parke D’Inv...

Nick Carraway sets up the scene, visits his second cousin, and describes the parties thrown by Jay Gatsby next door.The narrator, Nick Carraway, recently returned from World War I, finds a job in N...

Gatsby dreams of being reunited with Daisy.This is the mother of all anticipation stages. Although in the text this might last half the novel, we find out that it’s been going on for FIVE lon...

Nick meets his elusive next-door neighbor, the immensely wealthy Jay Gatsby. Nick sets up a meeting between Gatsby and his cousin, Daisy.Daisy and Gatsby resume their love affair from long ago, unt...

Fitzgerald messed around with a few different titles. In case you thought the epigraph wasn’t important, you should know that two potential titles were "Gold-Hatted Gatsby" and "High-Bouncing...

People are cheating on each other all over the place in The Great Gatsby. Tom Buchanan, in addition to that incident with the maid shortly after his honeymoon, not to mention his obvious pursuit of...

T.S. EliotKing Midas, from the Greek myth (1.12)Maecenas, a patron of the arts and a political advisor to Caesar Augustus (1.12) J.P. Morgan, an American financial banker, one of America’s fi...