Character Study of Jay Gatsby

Jay Gatsby is the central, enigmatic focus of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. When the reader first meets Gatsby, it is through the description of Nick Carraway, who notes that his neighbor of the less fashionable (i.e. 'new money') area of West Egg, Long Island has purchased a palatial mansion. Every weekend, people in motor cars come to Gatsby's parties; every Monday, the staff cleans up the debris. No luxury is too great for Gatsby: "every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York… There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb" (Fitzgerald 3). The source of Gatsby's wealth is vague and gradually it emerges that he made his fortune as a bootlegger.

Gatsby tries to affect a posture of being part of old, aristocratic wealth. He claims to be an Oxford man although he likely never went to school and calls Carraway "old sport." However, this is a sham, just like the uncut (i.e., unread) classics in his library, put out for show. The books symbolize the facade of Gatsby's persona "See...It's a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too -- didn't cut the pages" (Fitzgerald 3). Gatsby's clothing, home, car, and even his language all signal 'new money' even though he hopes that their ostentation will gain him entry into elite society. Specifically, he hopes to win the heart of Daisy Buchanan. But although Daisy is intrigued by him, maybe even loves Gatsby as much as she is capable of loving anyone, she is not willing to sacrifice her social standing to leave her dull, brutish but 'old money' husband Tom.

Gatsby states that his entire project of self-improvement was embarked upon with Daisy in mind. When he was a soldier in the war, he fell in love with her, but was too poor. Everything he did afterward was to win her and he does not even seem to see her husband as an obstacle because he is so convinced he could make her a better husband. Daisy represents all that he wants on earth -- social standing, beauty, and goodness. "There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything" (Fitzgerald 5).

However, ultimately Daisy is cowardly and weak-willed and is unworthy of such adoration. When Tom confronts both her and Gatsby, she refuses to renounce Tom. "Even alone I can't say I never loved Tom…It wouldn't be true" (Fitzgerald 7). In fact, the entire social set with which Gatsby is fascinated is equally unworthy of his adoration. Tom, for example, although he went to Princeton, is cheating on his wife and is openly anti-Semitic and racist in his political views. The fact that he is held in higher esteem than Gatsby speaks volumes of the societies of East and West Egg. Eventually, Gatsby takes the blame when Daisy hits Tom's mistress Myrtle in her car and is martyred for his love as Myrtle's husband takes his revenge on Gatsby.

Gatsby is very sympathetic to the reader, particularly when seen through the eyes of Carraway. He is, after all, a man who has apparently devoted his entire life to love and even sacrifices himself for his unworthy beloved. He did engage in illegal activity but it is worth pointing out that everyone, including Tom who mocks Gatsby's trade and social pretention, drinks heavily throughout the book despite Prohibition. Everyone enjoys Gatsby's largesse; they are just unwilling to validate him as a human being.

However, there are also clues that Gatsby's feelings for Daisy are less real love and more part of a self-improvement project he has pursued since he was a child living in the Midwest. After Gatsby's modest funeral, Carraway meets Gatsby's father, a very humble man named Henry C. Gatz who seems quite different from the image projected of Gatsby. Henry Gatz reveals that even at a young age, Gatsby was trying to realize the American dream and live a life like the aristocrats he idolized. Gatz produces a small book in which the young Gatsby recorded a 'schedule' of self-improvement, including daily exercises and resolutions such as not to waste time or smoke. It thus seems unsurprising that Gatsby came to love Daisy, given her symbolic rather than real function as admission into an elite society. Gatsby was born Jimmy Gatz but made himself, with the ingenuity so prized in America, into Jay Gatsby, the embodiment of wealth and privilege.

The reader can sympathize with Gatsby's determination even though he realizes that the life Gatsby wished to enter was not characterized by the perfection and purity Gatsby envisioned. Within Gatsby's character there is a stubborn insistence to believe the fiction he invents rather than the reality he actually inhabits. Gatsby repeatedly insists that Daisy loves him, despite her evident unwillingness to leave Tom. He is convinced he can buy people's respect and a social position that can only come through birth. He believes the false rhetoric that everyone can 'make it' in America, provided they 'pull themselves up by their own bootstraps' (or by bootlegging).