An Analysis Of One Of The Most Misunderstood Novels

A study of The Great Gatsby

Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about – F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Great Gatsby has been misunderstood; it is dubbed and made synonymous with wild parties and chiffon dresses. The idea of extravaganza? The Great Gatsby. One of the most intense love stories written? The Great Gatsby. Drinking and parties? The Great Gatsby.

Set in the Roaring Twenties, this book explores the social caste, the inevitable future, and the unchangeable past. It illustrates two main points; the unattainable American Dream and the harsh reality. Narrated by arguably Gatsby’s only friend, Nick Carraway, we follow along with Jay Gatsby’s tremulous pursuit of attempting to achieve his dreams. Nick tells of Gatsby’s story and displays all his struggles; he is the mediator between us, the readers, and Gatsby.

The American Dream of Jay Gatsby

By definition, the American Dream is the ideal in which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved. Jay’s version of the dream involved marbled floors and glory, imported silk-linen shirts and a woman named Daisy. As ambitious as he was, he was aware a man of his standing couldn’t have married a proper girl from the upper class.

From the start of the book, Fitzgerald paints a picture of an arrogant young man with great wealth and a host of notorious parties – but in reality, his characterising quality is pathetic. He is one of the misunderstood characters, not just to the readers but also to his fellow friends. He is surrounded by rumours, aided by his mysterious rise to wealth.

“Someone told me they thought he killed a man once.”

Jay Gatz, his birth name before he changed it, was never rich. He was just an ambitious young man who ascended to the top toying with illegal methods. He lies about going to Oxford, exaggerates his past, and prides himself on his materialistic artefacts.

After finding out Daisy is married, he climbs the societal ladder and makes a name for himself. Fast forward five years, he is notoriously known as a mysterious and lavish host for immoral parties and imported seasonal clothing garments.

All this glamour was not just for bragging rights. However, it was for Jay to have Daisy acknowledge him and his wealth, which he lacked previously – resulting in them not marrying in the first place. In this zealous pursuit, he moves to the East Egg, across Daisy’s and her husband’s abode. At the end of the first chapter, after Nick comes home from visiting his cousin, Daisy, he sees Jay Gatsby, symbolically stretching his arms towards the waters.

“ …he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”

This would serve as a foreshadow towards Gatsby’s inevitable demise; the green light of his dreams that he was chasing after, that was so close, yet so far. Ultimately, and literally, the American Dream kills him.

“I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know it was already behind him.”

Gatsby lives in the past, and he couldn’t let go of it. He was obsessed with Daisy, and his tunnel vision was fixated on her. Throughout the book, you can tell that Jay made it far in terms of status and wealth because of his perseverance and determination; unfortunately, these two traits didn’t serve him as well to get his true American Dream. Jay is obsessed with the idea of Daisy – not the actual woman.

I don’t believe he loves Daisy, and perhaps he did in the past; he just loved the idea she represented. Five years ago, he was just a poor soldier, just Jay Gatz; Daisy was the opposite. She was mysterious – that exclusive girl with a wealthy background. He lives in the past; even as he threw parties and was supposed to be happy, he wasn’t. In his world and his incomplete equation of the fulfilled dream, he was unhappy, and his fixation on Daisy made him shallow.

“Can’t repeat the past? . . . Why, of course you can!”

Villain or Victim: Daisy

Out of all the characters in the book, Daisy is the least understood. Fingers point at her as a villain, some as a pitiful woman. Although most readers think of her as evil and two-faced, we must think of the age when The Great Gatsby was written. It was not very ideal to the feministic views our world is acquainted with now.

She was the image of flowy white dresses and leisure – of living in luxury. However, she is more than that; more than a villain, more than a love interest of a slightly delusional man.

She shows her wit and intelligence more than once throughout the book – she understands her place in this society. In the 1900s, a woman wasn’t valued if she was smart, wasn’t valued if she could work; she was valued if she closed her mouth and, as the song lyric goes, “sit still look pretty”. She is a victim to the social caste of men and women, of the old ideas of how women should have acted. On the topic of her daughter she had with Tom, she tells Nick:

“I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

She is selfish. Indeed she is, but can we blame her? When she refused to divorce Tom after Jay Gatsby declared his love towards her, it wasn’t her stringing along with Gatsby, but rather her proving one of the points of the book; the unalterable past. How can she change the way she was brought up, her riches, comfort, and upper-class ideals? Jay may be wealthy now, but he was not when they first dated, whereas Tom was secure and available. New money versus old money; security versus fallibility.

She has her character flaws like the others; she allowed Gatsby to take the fall of the murder of Myrtle, Tom’s mistress. She is smart, conniving, and beautiful. But, she is just the Pandora of The Great Gatsby. She unleashes all the disdainful things before Jay, her cymbal-like voice enticing him, her beautiful image, and most important of all, she holds hope captive inside her hands. She allows him to take her burden of killing Myrtle and escapes with her husband; when Gatsby dies, she does not attend his funeral despite “loving” him.

Daisy, in general, does not express solid beliefs and emotions. The only noteworthy time she exhibited some form of reaction was towards clothes. At a particular scene of Jay showing off his dozens of imported linen shirts, she cries.

Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.”

She could be crying because of envy or for life she didn’t get. She could have had love and money, but time made her impatient, and under pressure, she chose loveless money.

She and Tom are the rich people that Nick people disapprove of; they’re an immoral couple that pays their way out because they can. They’re not evil because they have money, but instead, they don’t see the point in doing anything good with it. They can also reflect the other American Dream – a carefree life of money. Daisy was not mentioned to have guilt for allowing Gatsby to take the blame; perhaps she didn’t feel the need to, or that things were meant to be that way anyway.

Although Fitzgerald doesn’t give her a prominent voice, her presence in the book is as large as Gatsby himself. We need to remember that her portrayal was through Nick’s point of view and that Nick is biased towards Gatsby – he could view anyone disrupting Gatsby’s happiness as a villain. Thus, her “villainous” traits could be a by-product of that.

In the end, we cannot discern between the characters – can we call them bleak or villainous when they are read through Nick?

The Harsh Reality

As the book slowly unravels, small details of Gatsby’s facade is picked at, and his past is slowly revealed through snide remarks. Then, finally, our idea of this lavish host is tarnished and just like in real life, reality sinks in.

Jay never achieved his dreams; he managed to put his name out there and affiliate with the upper class, but he never got what he truly chased after – Daisy. What he wanted was unattainable after all; he wanted the past.

He lived in the past; he stayed in the past and only let his tangible assets change. He was in love with the version he made up of Daisy, that unattainable, mysterious goal that motivated him yet completely destroyed him as a human. He wanted the Daisy that he was with when he was a soldier, the Daisy that was never real—a corporeal souvenir from his struggling days.

Each time he got closer to Daisy, got closer to his goal, there was always a problem, much like in real life when we try to achieve anything. In the book, this problem takes the form of Tom Buchanan – Daisy’s husband. Tom reveals Gatsby’s past, which he kept hidden from outsiders; Tom pushes him, insults him, and targets him; Tom is the catalytic factor to Gatsby’s unfortunate death.

Through his narrator, Fitzgerald shows his disapproval of the social caste of the time. Nick has an obvious bias towards Gatsby, even though he is waddling in criminal activity as his source of income. Nick speaks and thinks of Gatsby at a high level – placing him on a pedestal – while he increasingly shows more chagrin towards the immoral acts of Daisy, Jordan, and Tom.

Nick acknowledges that Daisy and Tom could never change; they will never take responsibility because that is what the rich do – but what about Gatsby? They are vain and shallow, and they illustrate that the act of pursuing wealth and the hollowness you get from it is deadly – but to Nick, Gatsby is a melancholic man.

‘I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. 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 they made . . .”

Nick views the East Egg with rose-tinted glasses; he made it synonymous with it being a new start. After Gatsby dies, he takes them off.

“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable of Eastern life.”

This highlights the unchangeable past: you can’t change what you did, how you were brought up, how people are. In the end, they’re just kids playing dress-up in the grand scheme of things. At the end of the book, Nick moves back to his hometown.

When Gatsby dies, none of his friends attends his funeral; the only people who did were his servants, a postman, his father, Nick, and a Lutheran minister. At the beginning of chapter four, at Nick’s first party at Gatsby’s mansion, Nick lists off all the people who came; this outlines that despite all the parties that Jay threw, money can’t buy friends. That crosses out another one on the list of what money cannot buy: happiness, dreams, and money.

My Interpretation Of The Ending

All we can do is hope and strive forward in the full circle of life and the inevitability of our destiny.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

We all have a “green light”. Our green light is what we hope to have had achieved today, the next, or our goals in life. We all hold hope for the next day, just to be a modicum closer to our goals.

We don’t lose hope as humans. Instead, we use all our energy to drive forward, but in the end, we’re reversed back to the starting point; this is just the way life is—a circle of optimism and futile efforts to change destiny.

The pursuit of wealth and fame for selfish reasons isn’t worth having money just to impress. So ask yourself this: what counts as being wealthy or having a satisfying level of money? How many zeroes? How many memories were sacrificed in the name of shopping bags? Is money synonymous with happiness, or will the latter come when you are some sort of -aire?

All the passion Gatsby poured into his project, his great Odyssey. Yet, even with all those exterior beauties, he was slowly becoming a shell of a person, a hollow interior.

“He had thrown himself into it wth a creative passion, adding to. it all th time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

Perhaps that is why The Great Gatsby, though written almost a hundred years ago – ninety-six years to be exact – is still a withstanding classic. The Roaring Twenties isn’t that different from our lives, even in a great pandemic – the disparity between poverty and wealth is only growing increasingly bigger, the injustice of the rich, an outdated racial, social caste. We still have the incredibly rich bathing in cash – take the Kardashians – and the colour of your skin can play as leverage against disadvantages.

This book can act as a wake-up call to all those striving needlessly to be the next Steve Jobs, to be what they can’t, just for the sake of being famous. Aspiring towards your best self and trying to achieve your dreams are admirable, but like in the book, unworthy and impossible dreams would only waste your time – and possibly life.

It’s an understatement to say that Fitzgerald writes beautifully; this book reads like a fashion catalogue. His descriptions border on listlessness; it’s as if he deliberately writes such beautiful passages to distract the readers from the grime of reality.

The vivid pictures and imagery he produces spread a blanket on Jay Gatsby’s ending and past; it is covered up, much like real life. For instance, we cover up our sweat with highlight reels on social media – we let people see the envious parts of our lives. That may be why even after many decades, The Great Gatsby is still close to many’s hearts; we all can relate to him.

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