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A guide to the big ideas in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with the key passages that support them. Every quotation below comes from the novel, which you can read in full on this site, starting with Chapter 1.

The American Dream

The idea that anyone can rise through effort and imagination is at the heart of the novel. James Gatz, the son of poor North Dakota farmers, turns himself into Jay Gatsby, a millionaire with a mansion and a fleet of cars. Nick tells us that Gatsby “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” an invented identity he served with total devotion.

Yet the novel also questions the dream. Gatsby’s fortune comes from crime, his social success is hollow and the woman he wants is no longer the girl he remembers. The final page connects his longing with the hopes of the first Europeans who saw “a fresh, green breast of the new world,” and suggests that the dream always lies just out of reach: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

Old Money, New Money and Class

Geography maps social class. East Egg, with its “white palaces,” is home to inherited wealth like the Buchanans’. West Egg, where Gatsby and Nick live, belongs to the newly rich. Beyond both lies the valley of ashes, where people like George and Myrtle Wilson live among the dust produced by everyone else’s prosperity.

However rich Gatsby becomes, Tom and Daisy never accept him as an equal. Tom sneers at his pink suit and his background, and at the Plaza Hotel he wins the argument partly by exposing where Gatsby’s money comes from. The novel suggests that in America, class is about more than money: it is also about birth, manners and belonging.

Love, Desire and Illusion

Gatsby’s love for Daisy is the engine of the plot, but it is a love tangled up with wealth and status. Gatsby himself notices that Daisy’s voice “is full of money.” After their reunion, Nick wonders whether reality could ever match the dream Gatsby had built, given “the colossal vitality of his illusion.” Gatsby is in love less with Daisy as she is than with an idea of her and of himself.

The Past and Time

Gatsby wants to erase the five years since he left Daisy, and insists, “Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!” Clocks and time recur through the book: in Chapter 5 Gatsby leans against a “defunct mantelpiece clock” in Nick’s house and nearly knocks it to the floor. The famous last line, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” turns Gatsby’s struggle into everyone’s.

Carelessness and Moral Decay

Behind the parties lies a world of drinking, cheating, lying and violence. Tom breaks Myrtle’s nose; Jordan cheats at golf; Daisy lets Gatsby take the blame for Myrtle’s death. Nick’s final judgement is severe: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”

Gender and the Role of Women

The novel shows women in the 1920s gaining new freedoms, such as Jordan’s career as a golfer and the bobbed hair and independent young women at Gatsby’s parties, while still depending on men for money and status. Daisy’s bitter wish for her daughter is revealing: “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Major Symbols

The Green Light

Nick first sees Gatsby stretching his arms toward “a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.” It marks Daisy’s dock across the bay and stands for Gatsby’s hope. Once he and Daisy are reunited, its meaning for him begins to fade, and at the end of the novel it becomes a symbol of all longing for the future.

The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg

A faded advertisement for an optician watches over the valley of ashes. After Myrtle’s death, George Wilson stares at it and says “God sees everything.” Michaelis reminds him that it is only an advertisement. The eyes can be read as a vanished God, an empty commercial substitute for one, or simply an indifferent stare.

The Valley of Ashes

Described as “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat,” this grey wasteland between West Egg and New York is the dumping ground of modern industry. It shows the human cost of the wealth enjoyed elsewhere.

Colours

• Green: hope, money and the new world.
• White: Daisy and Jordan are first seen “both in white,” suggesting purity and wealth, though the purity proves to be a surface.
• Gold and yellow: wealth and glamour, as well as decay: the “yellow cocktail music” of the party, Gatsby’s gold tie and the yellow car that kills Myrtle.

Cars

Cars represent wealth and the speed of modern life, but they also bring danger: a car ends up in a ditch after Gatsby’s party, Jordan is a careless driver, and Gatsby’s car kills Myrtle.

Gatsby’s Shirts

In Chapter 5 Gatsby throws his shirts before Daisy, and she sobs into them. The scene shows how Gatsby has tried to win her with possessions, and how much those possessions mean to both of them.

Motifs to Track

• Weather: rain at the reunion, heat at the Plaza confrontation, the first hints of autumn (“Leaves’ll start falling pretty soon”) on the day Gatsby dies.
• Parties: crowds that conceal loneliness.
• Rumours and stories: who Gatsby “really” is changes with every teller.
• East and West: Nick ends by calling the novel “a story of the West, after all.”

Keep Exploring

Put these ideas to work with our study guide, the practice quiz and the different readings in our criticism guide.