Week two builds the historical and cultural context necessary for reading The Great Gatsby as a gangster novel. Students will examine the social forces of diversity, Prohibition, and the Jazz Age, explore the specific gangster elements embedded in the novel (rum running, Arnold Rothstein, bootlegging operations), and analyze the symbolic ways the novel draws on gangster fiction tropes—including meretriciousness, marital affairs, moral ambiguity, and violence.

Week three undertakes a close examination of the novel’s five major characters: Nick Carraway, Jordan Baker, Tom Buchanan, Daisy Buchanan, and Jay Gatsby. Students will analyze how Fitzgerald constructs character through selective detail, imagery, contradiction, and gradual reveal, and will consider how each character embodies and complicates the novel’s central themes of ambition, class, identity, and moral compromise.

Week four examines the craft elements that give The Great Gatsby its distinctive texture and depth. Students will analyze Fitzgerald’s dual register of poetic and vernacular language, explore the roots of the English language (Germanic vs. Latinate diction) as a creative tool, examine the novel’s major symbols (Eckleburg’s eyes, the valley of ashes, the green light, the Queensboro Bridge), and analyze the structural choices—geographic movement, parallel chapters, unreliable narration—that shape the reader’s experience.

Week five steps back from close reading to examine two larger questions: What is The Great Gatsby ultimately trying to do as a work of art—and what does it mean to read it as a gangster novel? Students will explore the concept of the ineffable (that which cannot be put into words) as a key to understanding the novel’s deepest ambitions, reconsider who the ‘real’ gangster of the novel might be, and engage with the novel’s closing passages as an invitation to reflect on their own lives, ambitions, and the stories they tell about themselves.