Topics for Research Analysis Paper

Choose one of the following topics for your analysis. The essay must be at least 5 pages typed, 12 font, double-spaced. You must have a minimum of 6 sources total, of which 5 will be secondary sources, and no more than 3 of which can be the same type. The novel The Great Gatsby counts as a primary source. You may use books, magazine articles, periodicals, academic journals, and reputable Internet sources. No personal websites will be accepted.

  1. Analyze the unifying effect of the recurring imagery in The Great Gatsby. Through rotten drivers, images of color (green, for instance), images of poor vision (owl-eyes, Dr. T.J. Eckleberg, and other characters’ figurative blindness), and so forth, Fitzgerald reinforces the story’s major themes about corruption, dreams, reality, and illusion.
  1. Analyze Gatsby’s dream, its origins, its development, and its final tragic end. Questions to consider: why are readers (and times) fascinated by it; how is it an innocent, pure vision; what is corrupt or deceitful about it; what are its deficiencies; what are its hope; how is it controlled by the past; how are our own lives and dreams controlled by the past.
  1. Historians see a troublesome irony in American history and consequently the American imagination. On one hand, Americans see themselves as proprietors of the New World, the land of boundless opportunity, a country whose western expansion represents hope and freedom. On the other hand, the rampant materialism that accompanies prosperity corrupts the very values that underpin a hopeful, self-believing, morally-confident society. Going from rags to riches (i.e. the American dream) could mean going from innocence to corruption, idealism to reality.

Discuss how Jay Gatsby personifies this irony in the American imagination and, hence, the corrupting possibilities of the American dream.

  1. Analyze the symbolism in The Great Gatsby. You will need to devise a thesis statement that pulls together all the symbols, explaining how they work to achieve a thematic whole.
  1. The Great Gatsby has many double-visions in it: the double-vision of Gatsby’s dream being the most significant. Analyze how certain relationships and individuals act as doubles, or foils, and thereby reflect on the ambiguities of the novel’s major ideas. Some foils to consider: Daisy-Myrtle, Tom-Gatsby, Nick and Jordan-Gatsby and Daisy, East Egg-West Egg, Wilson-Gatsby, Wilson and Myrtle-Tom and Daisy, Nick-Gatsby.
  1. Read the following passages from Marius Bewley’s “Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America” and then respond to the questions that follow it:

The Great Gatsby embodies a criticism of American experience – not of manners, but of a basic historic [American] attitude to life…The theme of Gatsbyis the withering of the American dream.

Essentially, this phrase [the withering of the American dream] represents the romantic enlargement of the possibilities of life on a level at which the material and the spiritual have become inextricably confused. As such, it led inevitably toward the problem that has always confronted American artists dealing with American experience – the problem of determining the hidden boundary in the American vision of life at which the reality ends and the illusion begins. Historically, the American dream believes in the goodness of nature and man. It is, accordingly, a product of the frontier and the West rather than of the Puritan tradition. The simultaneous operation of two such attitudes in American life created a tension out of which much of our [America’s] greatest art has sprung.

The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period, and is an attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions.

  1. What do you believe is the traditional definition of the American dream?
  2. How is Gatsby a story about the “withering of the American dream” (reread the passage and explain how the novel exemplified how the Americans in the novel have come to confuse the material and the spiritual, reality and illusion.)
  3. In 2004, seventy-nine years after the publication of Gatsby, how do you define the American dream?
  4. Does Gatsby still have any relevance to late-twentieth century America?