Blog 07: The Great Gatsby

In today’s blog, the focus will be the next of our A Level texts: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

With all of these blog posts, I’ll be highlighting three important things to consider to elevate your exam responses.

Key Character

Tom Buchanan. Following on from last time’s focus on Biff in Death of a Salesman, Tom is another character whose self-worth is tied to athletic prowess of more than a decade previously. This colours (given his racist tendencies, the choice of word is deliberate!) his attitude towards the other characters, and his need to control Daisy, Myrtle, and — in a different way — Gatsby.

Key Theme

Isolation. Jay’s tragedy is realised because he remains fundamentally alone, in spite of the parties he throws. Daisy and Tom, in spite of their differences, come together at the end of the novel: literally, as we see them sitting down to dinner together. Jay is excluded from this scene, which he can only observe through the glass: a fitting representation of the exclusion and isolation that he undergoes as a result of his social background.

Key Quotation

Nick calls the Buchanans and their ilk a ‘rotten crowd’, when speaking to Jay towards the end of the book: he says that Jay is ‘worth the whole damn bunch put together’. Fitzgerald here invites us to speculate about this idea of ‘worth’, which is a socially loaded word: from the perspective of society at the time, Jay is not ‘worth’ anything much; his role in holding a lens up to this society, though, forces us to question the implied hierarchies and prejudices encoded in such a term.

📌 If you want more of this focus on character, theme, language, and context to prepare you for your exams, get in touch.