¶ … Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald intended to create in the title character a uniquely American figure, one whose relationship to love, wealth and success was complex and shot-through with irony. Despite the fact that Jay Gatsby is certainly flawed, he is in the end a character for whom we feel great sympathy, in no small part because we (as American readers) can understand the psychological balancing act that Gatsby attempts -- and in the end fails to maintain. The skill with which Fitzgerald limned his characters helps us feel that we understand the ardent desire that Gatsby feels towards becoming successful and rich, even as we also understand that such desires can only lead to disaster. We know from almost the beginning of the novella that Gatsby is making a series of increasingly bad decisions, and yet we do not -- cannot -- condemn him. For we can, if we are being honest with ourselves, understand the desire to be successful, to make a name for ourselves -- not to be a nothing. And for Americans, in our New World, that desire to make a name for ourselves is almost inevitably based in the ability to become a person of substance -- to indulge in the green of youth and his previous identity, he has accumulated huge sums of money from various shady if not outright illegal operations over a number of years. And by the time of the novel he has assembled all of his accumulated money and all of his suppressed passion to try to transform himself into the kind of man that he imagines will impress Daisy and win her away from her husband, Tom.

But Gatsby learns the essentially…