Great Gatsby Literary Critique

¶ … 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 money in which Gatsby swathes himself in throughout his tales. We see in Jay Gatsby a cautionary tale of the path that any of us might find ourselves taking.

The Great Gatsby tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a millionaire whose antecedents and actions before the beginning of the novel are at the very best mysterious and are in fact (we suspect as we read more and more about the characters) are in all likelihood fairly sinister. Gatsby spend much of his time (and the novel) hosting almost continual parties at what is obviously great cost to himself . We at first think that these extravagant soirees are simply an attempt to impress all and sundry, but we soon come to understand (as narrator Nick Carraway tells us) that Gatsby is in fact trying to impress just one person in particular.

The person for whom all of this elaborate show is being staged is Daisy, whose voice -- in one of the most famous descriptions in American literature "is full of money." And Jay Gatsby has been trying to impress and to win Daisy since he was James Gatz, a member of a poor Midwestern family. Since his 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 American lesson that those who are rich when they are young are different from those, like himself, who have to create their own wealth and their own identity as members of the monied class. Those who gain money later in life -- whether it is gotten by honest or dishonest means -- will never feel at home with those who have always had money. Gatsby will never be rich in the way that Daisy is because he came into money too late to matter.

The truths that Gatsby learns about money are actually perhaps best expressed in "The Rich Boy," which Fitzgerald wrote the year after The Great Gatsby -- which ironically was not the financial success for the author that he hoped it would be.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.

Gatsby, who has had to work so hard to become wealthy and successful, has to be constantly careful of both riches and image in a way that is unimaginable to Daisy, who has always recognized that Jay is not of her world. Daisy -- and Tom -- are careless in a way that Gatsby cannot be. (This is, of course, what makes him a better person morally.) Nick describes the carelessness of those born rich:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess that they had made.

What keeps Tom and Daisy together is precisely what keeps Gatsby and Daisy apart. It is also what prevents Gatsby from feeling comfortable within the "ideal" world that he has built for himself: He can never have the sense of entitlement that inherited money grants, a sense of entitlement that Tom and Daisy can never lose.