Gatsby, or James Gatz, is rich as rich is rich. His house "was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side," and his suits and shirts cost more than a middle class man's yearly salary, and his parties coax even the most pretentious and ostentatious celebrities out their nests in New York. Yet Gatsby has nothing. He is the epitome of a man who has everything yet nothing. Although for the majority of the book we are led by Nick Carraway, the almost-omnipotent narrator, to believe he has his love for Daisy Buchanan, the fair beauty of Gatsby's wartime days, we learn that he has nothing but his mind's image of Daisy. The idiom "It's all in your head" never had more relevance than towards Jay Gatsby.
"It was a strange coincidence," I said.
"But it wasn't a coincidence at all."
"Why not?"
"Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay."
Daisy Buchanan is beautiful, youthful and full of leashed love that she struggles to pour into one person. Her husband, Tom, is a tainted Gatsby, a personality ruined by greed and lust which he exercises on Myrtle Wilson, the working class petrol station girl who is naught but an instrument of lust, implemented by Fitzgerald perfectly. She ceases to be just a person and grows into a personified theme: she sums up everything that is wrong with the rich people in the Egg islands (a perhaps harsh view on the red-headed disgrace? Judge me later). They are driven to live the life of the City, drinking, clubbing, drugging, fraternising, cheating, gambling. Fitzgerald shows the reader than Gatsby is without these taints, he is still rich, yet still his is unhappy. What this results in is a sense of pathos rarely achieved by any novelist writing about 20th Century aristocrats. I mean, who is sympathetic for a man that can afford to have a party every weekend to which thousands of people turn up? “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
Yet, amongst all this wealth and beauty, we are lured into a feeling of sympathy for Gatsby. We love him and envy him as a pathetic boy in a man's body, still in love with the first real beauty he set his eyes on. The most heart-breaking part of this book, and by Jove there are many, is when Nick Carraway tells us post-Gatsby's death, that only him and Gatsby's father attended his funeral. For a man who hosted thousands of parties, this is a catastrophic thing to hear. Fitzgerald portrays the shallowness of people who lived the kind of life that led them to go to massive parties every weekend. He shows how these people will pick you up, eat you and spit you out like unsatisfactory caviar. He shows how a middle-class struggling stokebroker-trainee such as Carraway is the only person who could see through Gatsby's charade of the 'old-sport' oxford-graduating aristocrat from wealth birth with kingly blood running through his veins. Indeed, Fitzgerald allows Gatsby to keep this blood until it unfairly pours out into his swimming pool after being wrongly accused by Wilson of killing Myrtle with his big yellow car. Of course, due to dramatic irony where we know in-fact it was Daisy driving when Myrtle was spread across the bonnet of the Rolls Royce like a squished fly. Gatsby died for Daisy, and what could be more appropriate than that, a man who lived his life for one person also died for them. But of course, Daisy would never appreciate that.
And so, Gatsby lives on in peoples memories as a distant reminder of 'that man who threw those fantastic parties' or 'that man who was a German spy', or better still 'I heard he killed a man once', which is my particular favourite due to the devilish irony.
Nick Carraway is a very simple yet good person. He is honest and reserves judgement, meaning her serves as a likable and trustworthy narrator. He displays qualities that others lack, and if this is hard to believe, then try and find someone in the book that has a better moral code than Nick Carraway. Okay, you got me, Mr Wilson is too stupid to even have a moral code...but we forget, that bugger shot Gatsby! How about Jordan? I hear you say. She may appear atrociously beautiful, yet remember she cheated in order to win her first golf tournament, and continuously bends the truth. Gatsby? You've got me there. It is hard to fault Gatsby for anything but developing a white-lie style image for himself. But then, for a man that had nothing then everything but still nothing, we have to give him some leniency.
Overall (a comic return to my A level essay days, I fear) The Great Gatsby is indeed great, and I believe it is a "must read", not because it teaches you a valuable lesson, but because it gives you the capability to teach yourself. 'Happiness is subjective', The Great Gatsby shouts at you, 'and what the hell are you willing to do attain it?'
