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Chapter 9 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. How is Gatsby’s death explained by the press in local newspapers?
2. How does Catherine respond to questions about her sister?
3. How does Wolfsheim’s letter attempt to explain his not attending the funeral?
4. Who is Henry C. Gatz?
5. Why does Klipspringer call?
6. When Nick locates Wolfsheim’s office and demands to see him, what is ironic about the situation?
7. How does Wolfsheim remember Gatsby?
8. Why did Gatsby continue to wear Army uniforms?
9. What could Nick mean when he concludes, “This has been a story of the West, after all—”?
10. What is the meaning of the last paragraph, the metaphor, of the book?
Answers
1. Wilson is a “madman,” reduced to a “man deranged by grief.”
2. She declares she has never known Gatsby, that she was “completely happy with her husband,” and that she has never been involved in any kind of mischief.
3. He is tied up in important business and cannot “get mixed up in this thing now.”
4. He is Gatsby’s father from Minnesota.
5. He calls about some shoes he left at Gatsby’s, not out of concern.
6. Wolfsheim is sinister and apparently ruthless, but he is whistling “The Rosary.”
7. He was a major, just coming out of the army, covered with medals.
8. He was so poor he could not afford regular clothes.
9. It is the story of the Western continent as well as the Midwest contrasted with the East.
10. We persist in our drive forward, but, like boats moving against the current, we are always borne back into the past. As the National Archives has it, “The past is prologue to the future.”