Chapter II Study Guide Questions

  1. Analyze and interpret Nick’s description of the valley of ashes: “This is a valley of ashes---a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”
  1. Write a literal definition of the valley of ashes. Write a symbolic interpretation.
  1. Who is Doctor T.J. Eckleburg? What is the significance of his eyes? Is he alive, a painting? Explain? Think about wasteland he presides over. Finally, what does he symbolize?
  1. What does Nick mean when he says that it had occurred to him that “this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead”?
  1. On first reading a description of Myrtle Wilson, what ways does she defy the stereotype of the powerful, wealthy man’s mistress? What is remarkable about her? Interpret what Nick means when he says that “there was an immediate perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.”
  1. Is Tom Buchanan lying to Myrtle about his relationship with his wife? Why does he tell Myrtle that Daisy is Catholic?
  1. Why did Myrtle marry George Wilson? What upset her deeply after she was married?
  1. Give an example each of the exceptional vanity of Mrs. McKee and Myrtle.
  1. Analyze, interpret, explain the following passage, especially the italicized phrases:

I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

  1. Why does Tom Buchanan break Myrtle’s nose? Does he apologize? Why is it ironic that Myrtle, bleeding profusely, tries to spread a copy of “Town Tattle” over the tapestry scenes of Versailles”?
  1. Consider the names of the photographs McKee has taken: Beauty and the Beast, Loneliness, Old Grocery Horse, Brook’n Bridge. What are there connotations?