F. Scott Fitzgeralds American Classic: The Great Gatsby - Essay Example

The two characters illustrate a central theme in the story, as well:  the theme of illusion vs. reality.  The current research investigation compares the motivations of Jay Gatsby, a character who is searching for a dream, to Nick Carraway, a character who is searching for the truth.  By looking at the ways in which characters are defined and illustrated in works of fiction, cues can be sought as to their similarities and differences. 

Fitzgerald employs a supportive device in the narrative character of Nick Carraway, Jay’s friend, and helper, who thinks that “life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all” (Fitzgerald, 3).  Gatsby is defined by his attempts to become less of an individual and more of a representation of his idealized sort of glittering society:  he wants to live a dream and has devoted his life to this romantic ideal.  He wants the class to go along with his wealth, so he constructs a fictional past to go along with it.  In contrast, Nick Carraway is very honest about his meager living as a bond salesman, and his position at West Egg.  Though often alone, Jay Gatsby moves through the novel towards his goal of becoming a visible part of the external world in which he is accepted as both wealthy and responsible.  His quest is indomitable due to an underlying, unwavering faith in an ideal. 

Jay’s faith is in the world to represent his dream and hold him up.  He completely believes that Daisy will provide him with the image of his happiness, which he has perhaps mistaken for happiness itself.  Jay bases all of his energies on providing a façade that will lure Daisy to him, as he believes in the utter importance of facades.  Nick, as he is courting Jordan Baker, is ultimately more rational and realistic.  Even his descriptions of Jordan are very matter of fact and physical:  “Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up” (Fitzgerald, 12).  In their relationship, what is at stake is the reality of a future and a life together, not the embodiment of some sort of dream or illusion.   

In Gatsby’s case, self-discovery is at least superficially an additive, and therefore potentially doomed, the process of manufacture in his dreams.  Fitzgerald sees the past as subtractive, and views progress as an additive, as evinced by his description of boats against the current.  By the end, all of his dreamings have resulted in Gatsby’s death, and the novel closes with Nick musing self-consciously that humanity goes on, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald 189). Subtraction throws Gatsby into confusion because he is an unrealistic dreamer.  One can potentially see the self as Jay does:  as something that must be hidden for external circumstances to occur.  There is

nowhere to hide:  Jay is a wealthy man who has failed to construct a suitable explanation

for his wealth; he has failed to live up to the responsibilities it entails.  Nick, on the other hand, is much more realistic.

The character of Jay Gatsby, who represents wealth as a state of being which

arises from dishonesty, is contrasted against the mediocre passivity of the character of

Nick Carraway, who, as the representative of a wealthy family, personifies a more

the conservative and even-keeled vision of affluence.  It would be a mistake to make

the assumption, however, that F. Scott Fitzgerald is trying to say that those whose wealth

is passed on from established patriarchy are innately more stable than the self-made

(or self-constructed) rich:  we see in the character of Tom Buchanan that the stagnancy of

sustained wealth can create conditions in which equally immense and deleterious

irresponsibility occurs.  

            Less sensitive readers may not pick up on the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald means to disparage Gatsby’s kind of wealth, because the narrative voice of Nick Carraway could be construed to lead the reader into a state of an over-objectified and passive desire to excuse Gatsby’s faults.  This image could then be mixed with the detailed and somewhat blasé description of the character’s material wealth to lead to a serious impression that nothing ironic is going on at all.  Jay Gatsby is ostensibly a classic American hero, a rags-to-riches product of bootstrap-pulling and grit, but The Great Gatsby has the distinct, confusing, and certainly unique position in American literature of being a deep novel greatly concerned with superficiality.

This makes him the realist, and Gatsby the dreamer.  This point of view is useful to the author because it lets him pass present judgments on events that occurred in the past while still providing a presence of immediate dialogue.  Nick is the quintessential lone representative of bucolic bourgeois patriarchy, “making his name” in an urban area.  He is careful and realistic about his prospects and has surrounded himself with family and social support.  Gatsby, on the other hand, is the quintessential self-made enigma, making his life story up as it goes along.  He is a loner and a dreamer.