The scope of the model

The essay below models a formal literary investigation within the required 1,200–1,500 words. Rather than treating a single passage as an isolated commentary, it examines choices across a complete novel. References to the novel are all paraphrased and cited by chapter, since pagination varies between editions. Secondary criticism is optional; this model draws only on the primary work.

For an actual submission, students must choose a work studied in class that they are not using for the individual oral or reserving for Paper 2. They choose the work and inquiry independently, in consultation with the teacher. This model demonstrates an approach. Any submitted essay must be the student's own work.

Model essay

Line of inquiry: How does Fitzgerald use Nick Carraway's retrospective narration to complicate the moral distinction between Gatsby and the society he condemns?

Work: Novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925).

Nick Carraway presents his account of Gatsby as an act of discrimination: among people whose wealth enables irresponsibility, Gatsby deserves exceptional sympathy. That distinction, though, is less secure than Nick's early judgments suggest. Fitzgerald makes him a participant in the social world he describes as well as the retrospective arranger of its meaning. Nick exposes the privileges of established wealth, yet repeatedly aestheticizes Gatsby's pursuit of it. Contradictions between his judgments and his participation begin to unsettle this moral opposition. Uneven narrative attention complicates it further, before the ending expands personal history into national myth. Gatsby stands apart from his wealthy neighbours not because he escapes their values, but because Nick lends his desire an imaginative dignity their behaviour cannot sustain.

Nick first claims authority by placing himself outside the social classifications that organize the novel. His account of his upbringing stresses restraint and openness. His family background, however, places him within inherited comfort. He recognizes the codes of Tom and Daisy's world because they are not wholly foreign to him. The distance Fitzgerald gives his narrator is therefore a matter of degree, not absolute separation. Moving east brings Nick into contact with unfamiliar extravagance while extending privileges he already enjoys. He criticizes this world with an insider's knowledge; he cannot claim the innocence of someone untouched by the system he judges (Fitzgerald, ch. 1).

His first visit to the Buchanans nonetheless builds a powerful moral case against their world. Daisy and Jordan's airy presentation initially makes privilege seem almost weightless. Then Tom's physical presence and interruptions expose the force that supports such elegance. By placing visual attraction and social aggression in the same scene, Fitzgerald makes refinement look dependent on domination rather than opposed to it. Nick does not describe ugliness in isolation. The setting's appeal helps explain why its inhabitants remain socially compelling, even as his own responsiveness to that appeal prevents him from becoming a wholly detached moral observer (Fitzgerald, ch. 1).

At the apartment gathering with Myrtle, this tension sharpens. Nick stays while Tom's affair becomes a performance of consumption and social aspiration that ends in violence. Intoxication disrupts his account, leaving gaps in its continuity. His participation thus emerges through a narrative that cannot fully control events. The contrast matters: a narrator who will sort other people's conduct into moral categories is himself susceptible to the atmosphere he describes. Discomfort does not automatically lead him to resist. Fitzgerald makes witnessing ethically ambiguous. Nick registers cruelty without preventing it, then later turns his compromised participation into a scene of judgment (Fitzgerald, ch. 2).

Gatsby's parties at first appear to belong to the same economy of display. Before establishing Gatsby as an intimate presence, Nick describes the abundance of his entertainments and the guests circulating through them. The host emerges first as the centre of a public spectacle, only later as a person. This order also separates the guests' consumption from Gatsby's investment in the occasion. Most visitors enjoy his hospitality without accepting obligations towards its source. Gatsby's apparent extravagance, by contrast, is eventually linked to his desire for Daisy. Nick's retrospective arrangement begins to distinguish motive from appearance, although a private romantic purpose cannot cancel the labour, money and manipulation behind the spectacle (Fitzgerald, ch. 3).

Delayed disclosures encourage this distinction while revealing how it is constructed. Nick first encounters Gatsby through rumour and self-presentation, supplemented by other people's recollections. Jordan's account of his earlier relationship with Daisy changes the reader's understanding of his house and parties. Sympathy depends on when Fitzgerald releases information: what first looks like aimless excess gains emotional direction. Nick assembles this movement retrospectively, so its coherence is not simply discovered. He narrates it into shape. Readers encounter a man with a powerful attachment, but also a storyteller increasingly committed to treating that attachment as the key to his character (Fitzgerald, chs. 3–4).

The reunion with Daisy tests this sympathetic reading. Nervousness briefly breaks through Gatsby's manufactured identity, revealing vulnerability beneath his assured performance. Instead of merely recording expensive surroundings, Nick attends to awkward gestures and shifting moods. Yet the move into Gatsby's house brings intimacy back into contact with display. His possessions help him present himself as Daisy's desired partner. Fitzgerald refuses to separate authentic feeling neatly from material ambition: Gatsby tries to express one through the other. Nick's sympathy persuades because the feeling seems genuine. The scene also reveals how thoroughly that feeling has learned the language of wealth (Fitzgerald, ch. 5).

The reconstruction of Gatsby's past deepens the problem. Learning about James Gatz and his self-invention makes identity seem an imaginative project rather than an inherited entitlement. Nick responds to its scale, lending significance to Gatsby's refusal of an ordinary life. Self-creation also demands repudiation, however. His ambition distances him from his parents and ties personal fulfilment to an idealized social position. The contrast with Tom is not, then, between materialism and its absence. Tom already possesses the status Gatsby imagines will transform him. They differ in their relationship to privilege: Tom treats it as a natural possession; Gatsby invests it with the promise of becoming someone else (Fitzgerald, ch. 6).

At the hotel confrontation, Gatsby's demand that Daisy erase her love for Tom exposes the coercion within that promise. To secure his imagined future, he must control the meaning of her past. Nick records the collapse of an absolute expectation that cannot accommodate Daisy's divided attachments. Tom's revelation of Gatsby's criminal connections hardly offers disinterested moral clarification. It protects his threatened social position. His motives do not, however, make Gatsby's demand reasonable. Fitzgerald brings entitlement into conflict with idealization without making either harmless. Nick's later preference for Gatsby must survive this scene, not erase it. His moral distinction rests on the quality of Gatsby's desire rather than on consistently ethical conduct (Fitzgerald, ch. 7).

The aftermath offers the strongest support for that preference. Gatsby waits outside Daisy's house, still imagining himself her protector, while Nick sees the renewed intimacy between Daisy and Tom. Their juxtaposition sets exposed devotion against protected solidarity. Later, Gatsby's former guests and associates fail to attend his funeral, giving social abandonment a concrete form. Nick struggles to gather mourners where consumers once gathered so easily. Yet Gatsby's father brings a perspective beyond Nick's romantic emphasis. The record of his son's youthful ambitions recalls disciplined self-improvement and a family history obscured by the invented identity. No single explanation contains Gatsby, including Nick's elegy (Fitzgerald, chs. 7–9).

The ending extends that elegy, connecting Gatsby's longing to an imagined history of America. His aspiration gains a significance unavailable to the Buchanans' retreat into security. At the same time, this enlargement risks turning a compromised pursuit of Daisy into a universal drama of desire. Fitzgerald keeps both possibilities active. Nick's final perspective exposes the destructive distance between promise and possession, yet can also repeat Gatsby's habit of idealizing what recedes from him. Retrospective narration complicates the moral distinction instead of resolving it. Gatsby remains implicated in the values Nick condemns, while Nick's arrangement of the story makes his longing worth attending to. The novel asks readers to recognize that imaginative sympathy can reveal a person without finally acquitting him (Fitzgerald, ch. 9).

Works cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.

How the essay answers its inquiry

The essay rests on a distinction between sympathy and acquittal. Nick makes Gatsby emotionally and imaginatively compelling, it argues, without demonstrating that he is ethically innocent. That distinction gives the investigation room to develop. Why does Nick prefer Gatsby, and why does his preference still invite scrutiny?

The inquiry connects an authorial choice—retrospective narration—to a problem of interpretation. It reaches across the novel. Early social encounters establish Nick's compromised position, while delayed disclosures redirect sympathy. By the conclusion, Gatsby's story has become a national narrative. Close attention to particular moments supports this broad literary investigation; it is not an extended commentary on one extract.

Criterion A: Knowledge, understanding and interpretation

Rather than recounting the whole plot, the model shows its knowledge through events that matter to the inquiry. At the apartment gathering, Nick participates in what he later judges. Gatsby's reunion reveals how he communicates feeling through possessions. The funeral, in turn, exposes the difference between accepting hospitality and accepting responsibility.

Those details become interpretation when they support a conclusion. In the paragraph on Gatsby's reconstructed past, the essay goes beyond identifying self-invention: it argues that Gatsby and Tom have different relationships to the same privileged social position. This complicates any easy opposition between a sincere outsider and corrupt insiders.

Well-chosen references also show knowledge of the whole work. Near the end, Gatsby's father provides an important qualification. His presence prevents Nick's romantic interpretation from becoming the essay's only account of Gatsby, strengthening the reading through a carefully selected detail.

That qualification could have more space in a revision. How does the father's pride differ from Nick's admiration? Explaining the difference would develop the essay's account of competing perspectives more fully.

Criterion B: Analysis and evaluation

Analysis explains how a choice produces meaning; evaluation considers its significance, implications or limitations. Neither amounts to praising Fitzgerald or deciding whether the characters are admirable.

The paragraph on delayed disclosure does both. First, it identifies the sequence in which Gatsby becomes known. It then explains how this sequence turns apparent excess into emotionally directed activity, before questioning the authority of the coherence Nick creates. The argument moves from choice to effect to interpretive consequence.

The discussion of the ending also evaluates rather than merely explains. Turning Gatsby's desire into an American narrative can expose the gap between aspiration and possession. Yet it can also idealize his pursuit. The essay weighs both possibilities instead of treating the ending as a transparent statement of the author's beliefs.

Word-level evidence remains relatively scarce. Paraphrased references support substantial analysis of narrative arrangement and broader authorial choices, but a few brief, carefully integrated quotations would make several claims about descriptive attraction more exact. Quotations should make closer analysis possible, not just decorate claims the essay has already made.

Criterion C: Focus, organization and development

The introduction establishes a position and sets out the argument's stages. Later paragraphs complicate that position. They examine Nick's social proximity and compromised participation, then consider how Gatsby's emotional appeal is constructed. The coercive side of idealization and the implications of the ending add further complications.

Following the novel's broad sequence does not turn the essay into a retelling. Each paragraph changes the answer to the inquiry. The hotel confrontation matters especially here: it tests the developing sympathy instead of simply supplying another example of it.

References sit within explanatory sentences, and chapter citations locate the evidence. In the conclusion, the distinction between understanding Gatsby and absolving him answers the inquiry. No unrelated theme is introduced.

A tighter transition between the party paragraph and the delayed-disclosure paragraph would make the organization more economical. Both explain how sympathy is redirected, so the essay needs to keep their separate contributions explicit. The first distinguishes host from guests; the second examines Nick's control over information.

Criterion D: Language

Register means, in the guide's wording, “the candidate’s use of elements such as vocabulary, tone, sentence structure and terminology appropriate to the HL essay.” Formal expression here serves precise literary explanation, not unnecessary complexity.

The model keeps author and narrator distinct. Fitzgerald constructs the narrative situation; Nick witnesses, selects, describes and judges. Verbs such as exposes and aestheticizing, alongside nouns such as juxtaposition, name particular operations. They do more than repeatedly assert that something creates an effect.

Qualifying phrases help control how strongly the essay makes its claims. To say that the conclusion risks idealization is to leave room for its critical force. This is not hesitation, provided the essay explains why competing implications remain possible.

Some abstract phrasing would benefit from a more concrete basis. The reference to Gatsby's emotional appeal, for example, is strongest when connected immediately to his nervous gestures or the display of possessions. Precise conceptual language stays connected to textual particulars.

Turning the commentary into revision

Use the model's method, not its argument. Formulate a debatable answer and select evidence from across the work, then explain how authorial choices make that answer persuasive. When redrafting, ask what each paragraph adds to the inquiry. Revise any paragraph that merely repeats an earlier claim. Check that references support interpretation and that analysis explains construction. The final conclusion must follow from the argument the essay has actually developed.