After a rather inauspicious early reception, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) has come to enjoy a position as one of the most widely read American novels of the twentieth century. In a sense, this august position is remarkable, in that the book does not involve heroism in war, remarkable achievement in humanistic enterprise, or the fulfillment of romance, standard fare for highly popular fiction. Rather, it is a story about failure and death, an idealistic quest for unworthy goals, and the almost total collapse of the aspirations of nearly all of the principal characters. Jay Gatsby lies dead at the end, mourned by his father, his neighbor Nick Carraway, and almost no one else. The narrator and, in an important sense, the protagonist, Nick has returned to the Midwest at the time of the narration, and he speaks with a tone of ironic detachment and bitter disillusionment about the events of two years before, when he left his home in Minnesota to head east to make his fortune in the bond market. He thought he was chasing the American Dream, the central mythological structure at the heart of life in the New World the Puritans established. His objective proved not only elusive but destructive, a depraved goal certain to yield an outwardly successful appearance concealing an empty core of superficial values.

The central problem in this plot is not that the quest for the American Dream is in some way fundamentally destructive, but rather that the version of it sought by Gatsby and Nick is a degraded corruption of the idea, a formulation that reduces the objective to money and to social status based on surface riches, not on the more fulfilling aspects of the original conception. When John Winthrop spelled out the basic principles of what became known as the American Dream in his 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” it presented his vision of a perfect society bound together by love and mutual respect, by religious devotion, and by the establishment of a deeply meaningful sense of community. In this model society, individuals would strive for economic advancement because their well-being was a tacit manifestation of the approval of the Deity, but the model also involved a concern for the welfare of others and a willingness to subordinate personal ambition to the common good. The acquisition of wealth was not the sole objective; also essential was the internal growth of the individual, the acquisition of knowledge, compassion, insight, and a human understanding that allowed for the harmonious progress of society. This model of the new social order, Winthrop maintained, would amaze the world and inspire other countries to imitate New England.

Benjamin Franklin seems to have understood this substantial view of the American Dream, for in his autobiography he outlined a plan for personal development in terms of internal personal growth in addition to the discipline and determination required to achieve financial success. Well beyond simple avarice, he outlined the need to develop modesty and humility, intellectual achievement, high moral principles, and a devotion to the welfare of the community at large. Given what his father reveals about him, Jay Gatsby apparently read Franklin’s commentary and gleaned from it only the most simplistic portrait of its economic surface. As Kirk Curnutt has indicated:

Thus, the central themes of the novel rest not on the American Dream itself but on a corrupted view of it that limits personal growth to the acquisition of money. The social structure that Winthrop envisioned in 1630 in establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony encouraged economic opportunity, to be sure, but he also called upon his flock to live humbly, to contribute to the welfare of the community, and to emphasize justice and mercy. As he made clear in “A Model of Christian Charity,” those were to be the central elements of his “city upon a hill,” the new society they were about to establish (Winthrop). Gatsby is not a learned man, and in an attempt to win Daisy, he grasps at the most superficial aspects of this idea, gaining wealth without acquiring knowledge or wisdom. He has a large library, but the pages in his books are uncut. He has an extremely limited frame of reference, unlike Nick, and his thinking is limited almost exclusively to current events, the bond market, and his romance with Daisy.

Fundamentally, the novel is the story of two men who pursue the national dream, the one who became known as Jay Gatsby and who was really James Gatz and another midwesterner who narrates, Nick Carraway. He tells the story roughly two years after the events have concluded, when he has returned home to the Midwest and a simpler life. This fact establishes the important realization that Gatsby is presented entirely in Carraway’s memory and never intrudes directly into the novel even for a moment. The order in which Nick reveals his subject is significant because it is out of chronology, proceeding incrementally from their first meeting. Nick presents his information not in the progression of Gatsby’s life experiences but in the sequence in which he learned about him.

The major scenes in which Gatsby is a key figure begin with the party in chapter 3, in which Nick finds himself discussing war experiences with a handsome gentleman he does not know. Nick remarks that he has not seen the host of this lavish affair and is startled when his companion suddenly says, “I’m Gatsby” (53). Always perceptive, Nick senses something false about his new friend, something slightly absurd in the formality of his speech, for example, and this realization continues to be reinforced. In their next meeting, Gatsby lies to Nick about his background, saying he comes from wealthy midwesterners and was educated at Oxford. When Nick inquires about where the family lived in the Midwest, Gatsby replies, “San Francisco,” a comment often misinterpreted in criticism. Its significance is not that Gatsby does not know that the city is in California, as some people have assumed (Lehan 60). Rather, it is a wiseacre response that means something akin to “none of your business,” a point Nick clearly understands. Nonetheless, he is astonished when Gatsby produces a photograph from Oxford and medals from the war, which lead him to the false conclusion that “it was all true” (67).

The next plot revelation concerns Gatsby’s early romance with Daisy, a moment in his life that determines all the rest. This account comes to Nick from Jordan Baker, Daisy’s close friend, and Nick reproduces it in Jordan’s voice as he heard it. Jordan knew Daisy in Louisville when Gatsby was a young lieutenant at Camp Taylor in 1917. Despite his relative poverty, Gatsby fell in love with the wealthy Daisy, but she rejected him the following year to marry Tom Buchanan, the wealthy heir to a family fortune. The driving force in this alliance is clearly riches, not romance, for Daisy seems to have loved Gatsby all along but felt that he was unworthy of her socioeconomic standing. This experience drives Gatsby to commit his life to the acquisition of wealth for the sole purpose of winning back Daisy. It is this expression of Gatsby’s idealization that impresses Nick to say to his friend, “They’re a rotten crowd. . . . You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” (134). As Jonathan N. Barron has commented, “That Gatsby was never in it for the money is to Nick proof that his is a story of the West after all” (66). It would seem to be realizations of this kind that eventually lead Nick to abandon his quest for wealth in the New York bond market.

Jordan Baker’s flashback scene from 1917 is juxtaposed to the “present” in 1922 when, after an arranged meeting at Nick’s house, Gatsby has an opportunity to give Daisy a tour of his opulent home, and his display of wealth causes her to weep. At this instant in the novel, the American Dream for Gatsby seems to have been an astonishing success: He became fabulously prosperous, and his money has brought his beloved back into his life just as he had hoped. For him, the money was a tool, not an end. Even a mansion means nothing to him without the love of Daisy. The song someone plays on the piano, “The Love Nest,” from the George M. Cohan musical Mary of 1920, expands the theme. One line of it maintains that a simple love nest for two is “better than a palace with a gilded dome.” A business person rather than a humanist, Nick is forced into a poignant realization of the depth of Gatsby’s affection for Daisy.

It is at this juncture, two years after Gatsby’s death, when Nick could have revealed everything in chronological order as best he knew it, that he reaches back to explain Gatsby’s childhood and early life. One key part of it was Dan Cody, who employed the young James Gatz on his yacht in Lake Superior. He taught Gatsby about wealth, about the accoutrements of money and how to enjoy them. Under Cody’s tutelage, Gatsby learned how to acquire prosperity and what to do with it. At first, he is mentioned only in the conversation between Gatsby and Daisy on her tour of the house (88), but soon, the full meaning of Cody’s example becomes clear. Gatsby had a brief stint at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, a Lutheran institution in the Norwegian tradition, but he soon left to seek his fortune at Lake Superior. He spent five years under the wing of Dan Cody, and he inherited knowledge, but not money, from him. At some point in their friendship, Gatsby confided this information to Nick, who now incorporates it into his narrative, helping to explain the motivation for the events.

One other dimension of Gatsby’s early striving is revealed to Nick at the funeral by the grieving father, who lauds his son’s generosity to him. He also shows Nick a copy of a Hopalong Cassidy novel on which the young Gatsby had written his schedule for self-improvement, emulating Franklin’s similar scheme. This is the plan for the achievement of the American Dream, a poignant objective for a poor boy who strives to better himself. (Unfortunately, it is dated September 12, 1906, four years before Clarence E. Mulford published the first of his Western novels about his celebrated hero. Fitzgerald was never much of a scholar.)

Gatsby’s profound idealization of Daisy is what made him deeply meaningful to Nick, who is in the party coming back from New York City when Myrtle, thinking that Tom is driving, runs out onto the road and is killed by the car Daisy is driving. As Peter L. Hays has argued, “The circumstances of Myrtle’s death point out the immorality: Daisy is responsible for the hit-and-run, but she never tells Tom how Myrtle was killed (letting Gatsby take the blame), and Catherine commits perjury at the inquest into her sister’s death” (170). Gatsby immediately offers to take responsibility for the accident, and Daisy allows him to do so. Even worse than that, she flees with her husband, leaving Gatsby to face the punishment. Ironically, he never realizes that Daisy has betrayed him, because Myrtle’s husband, George, shoots Gatsby in the swimming pool. It is Nick who carries the full realization of the empty shell of Daisy’s love in contrast to Gatsby’s deep emotional commitment, inspired five years earlier in Louisville.

The protagonist of a novel is generally taken to be the character who experiences the most significant internal conflicts and who is changed in an important way by the struggle. Thus, the lead character is dynamic in a way the supporting cast is not, secondary figures being essentially static. Although Nick’s portrait of Gatsby clearly shows that Gatsby changed enormously from his early childhood through World War I, other than acquiring a fortune as an adult, he is basically the same throughout the period from the war to his death in 1922.

As Richard Lehan has observed, “In creating himself, Gatsby had no social or moral context to give his intensity direction,” so he never gives depth to the invention of himself (3). Although he attended Oxford after the war, he dropped out upon learning that Daisy had married Tom. In essence, Gatsby is not educated, and in an attempt to win Daisy, he grasps at the most superficial aspects of the American Dream, gaining wealth without acquiring knowledge, insight, or wisdom. Nick is disappointed that he is a reluctant conversationalist with little to say (65). What is painfully clear is that he has an extremely limited frame of reference, unlike Nick, and his thinking is restricted almost exclusively to his economic concerns and his romance with Daisy.

Nick, on the other hand, is a much more interesting and dynamic character than Gatsby. For one thing, he has a sly sense of humor, an ironic perspective on life that demonstrates he understands the psychological dramas that unfold before him, and he constantly studies human interactions. As is clear from the beginning, he has come to New York in pursuit of his own American Dream, one that relies on making money in the bond market, but he engages that objective in the context of human interaction. In fact, he says almost nothing about his work, and he leaves it after Gatsby’s funeral. He came east in pursuit of money; what he found on Long Island was something much richer, an exposure to Gatsby’s intense romantic longing, the mystery of his fortune, his reunion with Daisy, and his death as a result of a profound misunderstanding. It is enough to cause one to ponder the meaning of life, and Nick does his fair share of this.

Nick’s humor is evident from the opening and runs throughout the novel. Irony implies sufficient distance to assess disparities, and Nick is at once sympathetic to the people around him and yet removed enough to sense the contradictions in their lives. In the first chapter, for example, he visits Tom, whom he had known in college, and Daisy, a “remote second cousin once removed.” He has keen insights into Tom, who had been a football star at Yale, and Nick senses that given that early stature “everything afterwards savours of anti-climax” (22). The reflections that Nick offers about him are consistently those of someone who is physically and psychologically cruel. Tom is unfaithful to Daisy, for example, and his affairs involve the most tawdry of women, foremost of whom is Myrtle Wilson. His social views are profoundly racist, and he is impressed by a recent book he cites as The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard. Historically, the book would have been The Rising Tide of Color Against the White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard, published by Fitzgerald’s own publisher, Scribner’s, in 1920. Henry H. Goddard was a scientist, not a social commentator. Tom thus displays a false sophistication based on pretense, just as virtually everything about him is charade. He has little genuine affection for Myrtle: He breaks her nose in their small apartment in the city, and it is her husband who mourns her death. Tom did not achieve the American Dream; he was born to wealth, and he proves unworthy of it.

Daisy married for money, secretly still loving Gatsby. In the opening scene in her house, Nick perceives the current status of her life: “Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her” (30). He understands both Tom and Daisy, just as he grasps the essence of Gatsby, insight drawn from the depth of his own humanity. Nick’s pursuit of the American Dream is based on a code of improvement not dramatically different from Gatsby’s own early plan. Still, as Scott Donaldson perceptively argues, “Nick Carraway and Jimmy Gatz come from the same part of the country, but they belong to vastly different worlds. . . . Nick is a not farmer from the country. He graduated from Yale, and so did his father. He knows about El Greco and Kant and Petronius” (138). As Nick reveals in a self-reflexive passage, in the early months of his arrival in New York, he was preoccupied with his work at Probity Trust, where he seems to be a bond salesman. As he explains, “I took dinner usually at the Yale club . . . and then I went upstairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour” (59).

Nick is on his own program of self-improvement which includes the adoption of abstract codes of conduct that he has internalized. When he begins a relationship with Jordan Baker, he has a troubled conscience about an emotional entanglement still unsettled in the Midwest. He confesses that “I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home” (61). Nick’s feelings are in direct contrast to Tom’s narcissistic rush for gratification and Gatsby’s later involvement with the married Daisy. Nick might tell about such things, but his actions and personal moral standards are another matter. He is disappointed in Jordan when he learns that she lied about having left a convertible out in the rain with the top down and that she had cheated in golf, moving her ball from a bad lie (60). When Gatsby suggests that Nick invite Daisy over for lunch, setting the stage for their reunification, Gatsby begins describing a business opportunity that would make a good deal of money. Nick cuts him short, avoiding any suggestion that he was performing a service for Gatsby in return for remuneration, an idea that offends Nick’s sense of honor.

At the time of the telling of the novel, Nick is removed both temporally and geographically from the scenes he relates. He is in the Midwest after Gatsby’s death, looking back on what happened, what it meant, and how it changed his life. After roughly two years of reflection, Nick comes to realizations he did not have at the time of the action. For example, he now offers the assessment that “Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (92). All of the terms of this observation are meaningful. The man Nick knew was Jay Gatsby, not James Gatz, the poor young man who transformed himself into Nick’s wealthy neighbor. That he did so as a result of his “Platonic conception of himself” probably reflects something of Nick’s education at Yale.

Plato proposed that reality was an abstract, spiritual realm in which the perfect essence of everything on earth resided. Human beings could grasp only an impression of this ideal state and create flawed copies in physical form. From Nick’s perspective, therefore, he sees his friend as having envisioned the ideal of the man he intended to become, and he reconstituted himself toward that objective, affecting a well-dressed persona with perfect elocution, for example. The problem is that Gatsby’s vision covered only the surface elements of a human being, and his relentless striving to win Daisy by fulfilling his initial conception of himself is doomed from the beginning. He never realizes that she is unworthy of his transcendent vision of her, even when the evidence is directly in front of him. He dies with his dreams intact, his illusions unsullied, his quest ongoing.

Thus, the American Dream is a powerful concept animating the lives of many of the characters, even some secondary ones. Meyer Wolfsheim, for example, pursues wealth but without even a glimpse of the inner enrichment at the center of Winthrop’s original idea. Similarly, George and Myrtle Wilson seek economic advancement but have little to offer the world in their quest. George’s chief objective seems to be to sell Tom’s expensive car and somehow get rich himself. Myrtle mistakes the sordid trappings of her love nest in the city for elegance, and she misinterprets Tom’s sexual dalliance with her as some kind of emotional commitment, which is why she runs out to his passing car when she is killed. She is desperately seeking a better life with him as her means.

Jordan Baker seems to live comfortably in the wealthy circles of East Egg, but she cheats and lies habitually, a clear violation of the moral standards of her social set. Tom has wealth but an impoverishment of character, cheating on his wife during their honeymoon and engaging in countless affairs. His social attitudes and racist proclivities reveal the dark interior of his mind. Daisy, too, has already achieved the financial objectives of economic advancement, but she is cynical and emotionally unfulfilled, and she lives with a philandering husband. When she is reunited with Gatsby, she quickly begins an affair with him, mirroring Tom’s behavior.

Jay Gatsby is most visibly engaged in the financial pursuit of the American Dream, but he does so to achieve the social and economic status Daisy requires of him. When he shows her his house, she is profoundly moved not by the depth of his devotion to her, but by the extent of his wealth. The shallowness of her emotion is revealed when she allows him to take responsibility for her driving accident, which costs him his life. On his journey to wealth, he has affected the style, dialect, and appearance of the upper crust, but he has not grown internally, still arrested in his infatuation of 1917. That is the tragedy of his life.

Gatsby’s triumph, as Nick regards it, is his steadfast, unflinching devotion to his dream of Daisy as the transcendent fulfillment of romantic love. In his assessment of her, Barron has maintained that “if one reads Daisy as a Southern belle, one must also read her as too invested in her cultural heritage to welcome Gatsby into her arms as a husband. What Daisy requires is certitude and security, and, no matter how racist and philandering Tom may be, he will always provide her with the lifestyle to which she has grown accustomed” (66). She is grossly unworthy of Gatsby’s intense commitment to her, but he is oblivious to the facts, impervious to experience.

Nick serves as the true protagonist in the novel, because he experiences emotional conflict and moral turmoil, and he grows and changes in response to it. Behind him is his time at Yale and his service in the war, but he nevertheless sustains his illusions about finding fortune in New York. Instead of wealth, he encounters the internally enriching world of Jay Gatsby and Daisy, and he learns much from it. He is progressively more empathetic to his neighbor’s romantic quest, and he shares his insights into the key players in the drama with the readers of the novel he narrates.

As John B. Chambers points out, even from the beginning, Nick comments on the inner values of the people around him: “Varieties of conduct are presented not as indicators of gradations on a social scale but as expressions of an inner moral code” (111). He reflects on the moral dimensions of his own brief romances, cutting off one relationship back home and drifting away from Jordan when he is uncomfortable with what he discovers about her. The strongest evidence of his growth, however, is that at the time he narrates he is home in the Midwest, having rejected the superficial trimmings of life in the East in favor of a simpler but more substantial future in the region he knows best. He is a sympathetic and perceptive viewer of life who observes more than he acts. His wry perceptions into the inner resources of those around him, and his playful manipulations of language, provide ironic humor to an otherwise darkly tragic chain of events. The sweep of the story he tells covers much of what was modern America at the time. As Lehan has suggested:

It is Nick’s mind, his experience, and his rejection of the corrupted surface of the American Dream, however, that make The Great Gatsby one of the finest modern novels in American literature.

Works Cited