Jay Gatsby Character Analysis

Jay Gatsby Character Analysis

If you read The Great Gatsby, odds are you will have to write at least one paper that analyzes Gatsby as a character or connects him to a larger theme, like money, love, or the American Dream.

To do this well, you should closely read Gatsby’s key scenes (meeting Daisy again in Chapter 5, the confrontation in the hotel in Chapter 7, his decision to take the blame in Chapter 8) along with his background, revealed over Chapters 6, 8, and 9. By understanding both Gatsby's past and his present in the novel, you can write about him confidently despite his many-layered personality.

It can be helpful to compare Gatsby to other characters, because it can make it easier to understand his attitude and motivations. Nick’s cynical nature makes Gatsby’s naiveté and optimism readily apparent, for example.

You should also consider how Gatsby’s interaction with the book’s famous symbols (especially the green light) reveal aspects of his character.

Remember that there are many valid ways to interpret Gatsby, as he is a very complex, mysterious character. As long as you back up your arguments with evidence from the book you can connect Gatsby to various big-picture themes and ideas. We will explore that in action below with some common essay topics about Gatsby.

Gatsby is especially linked to the American Dream!

What makes Gatsby so great?

I think the best way to tackle this question is to ask “why is Gatsby called great” or “who thinks Gatsby is great?” That way you won’t get bogged down in an unoriginal argument like “well, he has a lot of money and throws amazing parties, and that’s pretty awesome, so…he’s pretty great I guess?”

Remember that the book is narrated by Nick Carraway, and all of our impressions of the characters come from his point of view. So the real question is “why does Nick Carraway think Gatsby is great?” Or in other words, what is it about Gatsby that captures cynical Nick Carraway’s imagination?

And the answer to that comes from Gatsby’s outlook and hope, not his money or extravagance, which are in fact everything that Nick claims to despise. Nick admires Gatsby due to his optimism, how he shapes his own life, and how doggedly he believes in his dream, despite the cruel realities of 1920s America. So Gatsby’s greatness comes from his outlook – even if, to many readers, Gatsby’s steadfast belief in Daisy’s love and his own almost god-like abilities come off as delusional.

Why is Gatsby obsessed with repeating the past?

Gatsby is not so much obsessed with repeating the past as reclaiming it. He wants to both return to that beautiful, perfect moment when he wedded all of his hopes and dreams to Daisy in Louisville, and also to make that past moment his present (and future!). It also means getting right what he couldn’t get right the first time by winning Daisy over.

So Gatsby’s obsession with the past is about control – over his own life, over Daisy – as much as it is about love. This search for control could be a larger symptom of being born into a poor/working class family in America, without much control over the direction of his own life. Even after he’s managed to amass great wealth, Gatsby still searches for control over his life in other ways. Perhaps he fixates on the reclamation of that moment in his past because by winning over Daisy, he can finally achieve each of the dreams he imagined as a young man.

How would the book be different if Gatsby “got the girl?”

The Great Gatsby would probably be much less memorable, first of all! Sad endings tend to stick in your mind more stubbornly than happy ones. Furthermore, the novel would lose its power as a reflection on the American Dream -- if Gatsby ended up with Daisy, the book would be a straightforward rags-to-riches American Dream success story. In order to be critical of the American Dream, Gatsby has to lose everything he’s gained.

The novel would also lose its power as an indictment of class in America, since if Daisy and Gatsby ended up together it would suggest walls coming down between old and new money, something that never happens in the book. Instead, the novel depicts class as a rigid and insurmountable barrier in 1920s America.

A happy ending would also seem to reward both Gatsby’s bad behavior (including crime, dishonesty, and cheating) as well as Daisy’s (cheating, killing Myrtle). This would change the tone of the ending, since Gatsby's tragic death seems to outweigh any of his crimes in Nick's eyes. Also, Gatsby likely wouldn't have caught on as an American classic during the ultra-conservative 1950s had its ending appeared to endorse behavior like cheating, crime, and murder.

In short, although on your first read of the novel you more than likely are hoping for Gatsby to succeed in winning over Daisy, the novel would be much less powerful with a stereotypically happy ending.

How does Jay Gatsby represent the American Dream? Should we be hopeful or cynical about the status of the American Dream by the end of the novel?

There is a bit of a progression in how the reader regards the American Dream in the course of the novel, which moves in roughly three stages and corresponds to what we know about Jay Gatsby.

First, the novel expresses a cautious belief in the American Dream. Gatsby’s parties are lavish, Nick rides over the Queensboro bridge with optimism and the belief that anything can happen in New York (4.55-7), and we see some small but significant breaking of class conventions: Myrtle holding court at an apartment with Tom Buchanan (Chapter 2), the “modish” African Americans riding over the bridge with a white driver (4.56), old money and new money mingling at Gatsby’s party (Chapter 3).

However, this optimism quickly gives way to skepticism. As you learn more about Gatsby’s background and likely criminal ties in the middle-to-late chapters (4-8), combined with how broken George seems in Chapter 7 upon learning of his wife’s affair, it seems like the lavish promises of the American Dream we saw in the earlier half of the book are turning out to be hollow, at best.

This skepticism gives way to pessimism by the end of the novel. With Gatsby dead, along with George and Myrtle, and only the rich alive, the novel has progressed to a charged, emotional critique of the American Dream. After all, how can you believe in the American Dream in a world where the strivers end up dead and those born into money (literally) get away with murder?

So by the end of the novel, the reader should be pretty pessimistic about the state of the American Dream, though there is a bit of hope to be found in the way Nick reflects on Gatsby’s outlook and extends Gatsby's hope to everyone in America.

Is Gatsby a tragic hero?

How you answer this prompt will depend on the definition you use of tragic hero. The most straightforward definition is pretty obvious: a tragic hero is the hero of a tragedy. (And to be precise, a tragedy is a dramatic play, or more recently any work of literature, that treats sorrowful events caused or witnessed by a great hero with dignity and seriousness.) If we consider The Great Gatsby a tragedy, that would certainly make Gatsby a tragic hero, since he’s the hero of the book!

But in Aristotle’s (influential) and more specific definition, a tragic hero is a flawed individual who commits, without evil intentions, some wrong that leads to their misfortunate, usually followed by a realization of the true nature of events that led to his destiny. The tragic hero also has a reversal of fortune, often going from a high place (in terms of society, money, and status) to a ruined one. He also has a “tragic flaw,” a character weakness that leads to his demise.

Using Aristotle’s definition of a tragic hero, Gatsby might not fit. There isn’t a sense that he commits some great wrong (unlike, say, the classic example of Oedipus Rex, who kills his own father and marries his mother) – rather, his downfall is perhaps the result of a few smaller wrongs: he commits crimes and puts too much faith in Daisy, who ends up being a killer. In that sense, Gatsby is more of a playful riff on the idea of a tragic hero, someone who is doomed from aiming too high and from trusting too much.

Especially since a huge part of The Great Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream, and specifically the unjust American society that all of the characters have to live within, the idea of a tragic hero – a single person bringing about his own fate – doesn’t quite fit within the frame of the novel. Instead, Nick seems to indict the society around Gatsby for the tragedy, not Gatsby himself.