"GREAT" or "MISTAKE?"

Is The “Great Gatbsy” himself really that “Great?”

The Great Gatsby is a classic book that has often been described as the classic, Modern-American Novel, while I am not attempting to question that appropriation, I do want to question Gatsby’s “Greatness?”

The narrator of the novel is Nick Carraway, another Midwesterner and veteran, and a 1915 Yale graduate, who by chance has rented the next to Gatsby’s as he tries his hand at the New York Bond business. On the first page of the book Nick says that he’s inclined to reserve all judgments of people, but on the second page he notes that Gatsby represented everything for which he has an unaffected scorn. Later Nick says that he disapproved of Gatsby from beginning to end. In fact, we learn during the book that Gatsby has lied more than once, that he has apparently accumulated his wealth not only immorally but illegally, and that he’s willing to sacrifice anything for his infatuation with a married woman. So again, what’s so great about Gatsby?

Well, Nick also tells us that Gatsby had “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”(2) Nick explains that “The truth was that Jay Gatsby. Sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God..and he must be about his father’s business”(99). He was an idealist who lived with” a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”(100)
Gatsby’s idealism is closely related to the American Dream: If only one works hard, just the way Benjamin Franklin told us to, and Gatsby had developed his own list of resolutions as a boy; one would become healthy, wealthy and wise. His father said after Gatsby was found murdered in his own swimming pool: “He had a big future before him, you know.. If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill, He’d of helped build up the country.”(169)

Yet Gatsby’s idealism, once he met Daisy, became attached solely to her. After he made love to her while he was in the army, “he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.”(149) As Nick learned later, Gatsby “knew Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a ‘nice’ girl could be.” Although penniless, he had let her believe that he was from much the same social stratum as herself, and she came to represent everything that he wanted his life to be. As Fitzgerald writes, “Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”(150)

One leaves this book feeling that Gatsby is indeed great—certainly in comparison to those who surround him in Fitzgerald’s novel. Yet he is also tragically flawed by impoverished dreams and by limited ideals. On the last page of the book Nick says, “I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come along way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind..”(182)

Works Cited
The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald, 1925