Ask who Jay Gatsby is and most readers answer with a costume: the pink suit, the mansion, the parties, the mysterious smile. A Jay Gatsby character analysis that stops at the costume has missed the man, because Gatsby is not finally a set of traits you can list. He is a direction. He is a person organized entirely around something he is reaching for, and the central question this study answers is not what Gatsby has or what Gatsby looks like but what Gatsby wants, why he cannot stop wanting it, and what that single orientation does to him across nine chapters. The answer is the difference between reading the novel for plot and reading it for argument.
The trouble with the costume reading is that it treats Gatsby as a noun, a rich man with secrets, when the novel writes him as a verb. Everything that matters about him is an action of striving: the arms reaching toward the green light, the parties thrown to summon one absent guest, the past he insists can be rebuilt by sheer will. To understand him you have to read the reaching, not the props. This is the man who is all verb, and naming him that way is the through line of everything below. His tragedy is not that he wants the wrong thing. It is that the wanting itself has grown so large that no real object could ever fill it, so the striving outlives every version of Daisy a living woman could be.
What Is Jay Gatsby’s Function in the Novel?
Before the psychology, the mechanics. Gatsby is the engine of the plot, but he is also, structurally, an absence that the first third of the book circles without entering. Fitzgerald withholds him. Nick rents the small house beside the enormous one, hears the music, watches the cars arrive and leave, and only meets his neighbor well into a crowded party, by accident, without knowing it is him. That delay is not a trick. It builds Gatsby as rumor before it lets him be a person, so that when the man finally speaks, he arrives pre-loaded with everyone else’s guesses: that he killed a man, that he was a German spy, that he is related to the Kaiser. The function of all that hearsay is to make Gatsby a screen onto which a whole society projects, which is exactly what he is to himself.
His plot function tightens once the green light is explained. The parties, it turns out, were never social ambition. They were a net cast across Long Island Sound in the hope of catching one fish. Gatsby fills his house with strangers on the chance that Daisy Buchanan might one night wander in. When she does not, he changes tactics and arranges, through Nick and Jordan, the famous reunion over tea. From that point Gatsby drives the action directly: the renewed affair, the confrontation in the Plaza suite, the drive home that ends with Myrtle dead under the wheels of his car, the vigil outside the Buchanan house, and finally his own death in the pool. The novel’s events do not happen to Gatsby so much as fan out from his single decision to recover a woman he lost five years earlier.
He also functions as a measuring stick for everyone around him. Tom’s brutality, Daisy’s carelessness, Nick’s compromised honesty, even the predatory cheerfulness of the party guests all become legible by contrast with Gatsby’s appetite for a single, hopeless aim. The careless people who use his house and ignore his funeral are defined by their lack of the thing he has in excess. That is why Nick, who claims at the outset to reserve judgment and then judges everyone, ends by setting Gatsby above the entire crowd. Gatsby’s function is to be the one figure whose wanting is real in a world of people who want nothing badly enough to be ruined by it.
How Does Fitzgerald Introduce Gatsby?
Fitzgerald introduces Gatsby twice, and the gap between the two introductions is the first clue to the whole character. The first time, at the end of Chapter 1, Nick sees a figure on the lawn at night who stretches his arms toward the dark water and a single green light across the bay, then vanishes when Nick looks again. There is no name, no dialogue, only a gesture of reaching that the rest of the novel will spend itself explaining. Gatsby is introduced, in other words, as an act of longing before he is introduced as a man, and that order is the argument in miniature.
Why does Fitzgerald delay Gatsby’s first real appearance?
The delay turns Gatsby into a question the reader must ask rather than a fact the reader is handed. By the time he speaks in Chapter 3, party gossip has built him into a legend, so his shy manner lands as deliberate deflation. Withholding him lets the reaching gesture come first, framing the man as desire.
The second introduction, the meeting at the party, deflates the legend on purpose. After pages of monstrous rumor, the actual Gatsby turns out to be a slightly awkward young man who calls Nick “old sport,” smiles a smile of extraordinary reassurance, and slips away to take a phone call from Chicago or Philadelphia. The smile is the set piece of the introduction, and it is worth reading closely because it tells you how Gatsby operates on other people. Nick describes it as a smile that “understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” Notice that every clause is about the person being smiled at, not about Gatsby. The smile is a mirror. It works by reflecting your best image of yourself back at you, which is the same trick Gatsby works on himself when he believes in his own invented past.
That doubled introduction, the night gesture and the mirroring smile, frames Gatsby as a man who is mostly the shape of other people’s hopes, including his own. Fitzgerald never lets you see a stable, private Gatsby underneath the performance, because there may not be one. The closest the novel comes to a core is the buried boy from North Dakota, and Gatsby has spent his adult life papering over that boy. What is left to introduce is the reaching itself, which is why the first image of him is a man on a lawn with his arms out toward a light he cannot touch.
What Does Gatsby Want? The Psychology of Desire
Here is the center of any Jay Gatsby character analysis, and the place most readings go soft. The easy answer is that Gatsby wants Daisy, and that is true at the surface. The more accurate answer is that Gatsby wants to abolish the five years that separate him from the version of himself who first loved Daisy in Louisville, and that he has fused that wish with Daisy until the woman and the lost time have become a single object he cannot pry apart. He does not want Daisy as she is in 1922, a married mother with a careless husband. He wants Daisy as the proof that the past is recoverable, that the poor lieutenant who kissed her could become a man worthy of her and then simply rewind the world to the moment before she married Tom.
What does Gatsby really want?
Gatsby wants the past restored whole, not merely Daisy reclaimed. He wants Daisy to erase the intervening five years by telling Tom she never loved him, so the timeline snaps back to Louisville. His desire is for a reversal of time disguised as a romance, which is why no living woman could ever satisfy it.
This is why his demand in the Plaza is so strange and so revealing. He does not ask Daisy to leave Tom and build a future. He asks her to say she never loved Tom at all, to delete the marriage retroactively so that the past can be repaired rather than escaped. When Daisy admits she did love Tom once, even a little, Gatsby’s whole project collapses, because his project was never about going forward. It was about going back. Earlier, when Nick warns him that you cannot repeat the past, Gatsby answers with the line that defines his psychology: “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” He says it as if Nick has stated something obviously false, because in Gatsby’s interior logic the past is not gone. It is a place he can return to with enough money and enough will.
The engine under the desire is what Nick calls his extraordinary gift for hope. Gatsby’s wanting is not greedy in the ordinary sense; he barely touches his own wealth, leaves his parties early, drinks little, and uses his fortune almost entirely as bait. The wanting is closer to a faith. He has organized his entire self around the belief that the future can be made to deliver a restored past, and that belief is so total that the real Daisy, the actual woman, becomes an obstacle to it. Fitzgerald says it plainly: even on the afternoon of the reunion there were moments when Daisy fell short of his dreams, not through any fault of hers, but because of the sheer scale of what he had built her into. No living person can carry the weight of five years of accumulated longing. The dream has outgrown its object, and that gap is the psychological heart of the character.
This is also why Gatsby is not, in the end, a romantic in the simple sense. A romantic loves a person. Gatsby loves a fixed moment and has chosen a person to stand for it. When he kisses Daisy in his memory of Louisville, he describes wedding his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, and Nick notes that after that night no amount of fire or freshness could challenge what a man stores up in his ghostly heart. The phrase ghostly heart is exact. Gatsby loves a ghost, an idealized image stored years ago, and the breathing woman is asked to match it. She cannot, and the failure is built into the desire from the start.
Gatsby as Symbol: The Self and the Dream
Gatsby’s symbolic weight is heavier than almost any character in American fiction, and it rests on one move Fitzgerald makes in Chapter 6: he tells us that Jay Gatsby is an invention. The man was born James Gatz, the son of poor farm people in North Dakota, and at seventeen he renamed himself and set out to become someone else entirely. Fitzgerald writes that the truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg sprang from his Platonic conception of himself, that he was, in his own imagination, a son of God who must be about his Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. That sentence is the key to the symbol. Gatsby is a self that authored itself, and so he becomes the figure of the American belief that a person can be remade from scratch by will and money.
What raises this from clever to tragic is the word meretricious, which means showily attractive but false, cheap underneath the shine. Fitzgerald gives Gatsby a self-made grandeur and in the same breath calls the beauty he serves a fake. Gatsby is the American dream of self-invention taken to its limit, and the novel admires the reaching while naming the rot at its base. The mansion is a copy of a French hotel. The library is full of real books no one has cut open. The name is borrowed, the accent is rehearsed, the money is bootlegged. Every emblem of his success points back to its own hollowness, and yet the wanting that built it is genuine. Gatsby is the symbol of a dream that is real as desire and counterfeit as fact.
He also carries the green light, the most concentrated symbol in the book, and his relationship to it is what makes the symbol work. When Nick first sees Gatsby reaching toward the light at the end of Daisy’s dock, it is pure futurity, a beacon for a longing not yet named. Once Daisy is standing beside him in Chapter 5, the light loses its enchanted distance and becomes, as Nick observes, again a green light on a dock, an ordinary object now that the thing it stood for is within reach. The symbol shrinks the instant the dream is fulfilled, which is the novel’s verdict on Gatsby’s whole enterprise: the reaching is everything, and the having empties it out. By the final page the green light has widened back out into the symbol of all human striving, the orgastic future that recedes faster than we can run, and Gatsby has become the representative man of that doomed pursuit. If you want to trace how that pursuit organizes his entire life rather than just his love story, the study of Gatsby as the self-made man reconsidered follows the invention from the boyhood schedule to the bootlegged fortune.
Gatsby and Time: His Fatal Relationship to the Past
No single element does more to explain Gatsby than his relationship to time, and it is worth isolating because it is the mechanism beneath everything else. Most people experience the past as fixed and the future as open. Gatsby has reversed the polarity. For him the future is fixed, because he already knows exactly what it must contain, a restored Louisville with Daisy beside him, and the past is the thing he intends to change. This inversion is not a metaphor in the novel. It is literal in his speech and his demands, and it is what makes him both magnificent and doomed.
Watch the way Fitzgerald stages it physically. During the reunion in Chapter 5, Gatsby leans against the mantelpiece in Nick’s house, and a defunct mantelpiece clock tilts dangerously at the pressure of his head. He turns and catches it with trembling fingers, and Nick imagines it shattering. The clock is the obvious symbol, stopped and dead, and Gatsby nearly knocks time itself off the shelf and then scrambles to save it, apologizing for a clock that does not work. The image is comic and devastating at once. Gatsby’s whole enterprise is an attempt to stop a clock that has already stopped for him, to hold the hands at the hour before Daisy married Tom.
His creed makes the relationship explicit. When Nick says, gently, that you cannot repeat the past, Gatsby answers that of course you can, crying it incredulously, as though Nick had denied something self-evident. The exchange is the philosophical center of the character. Gatsby does not want to move forward into a new life with Daisy. He wants to reach backward and edit, to make the five intervening years never have happened, which is why his demand in the Plaza is for an erasure rather than a divorce. He needs Daisy to declare she never loved Tom, because anything short of that leaves the past intact, and an intact past is exactly what he cannot tolerate. His tragedy is that time does not run the way his faith requires, and the novel’s final image, of boats borne back ceaselessly into the past, generalizes his private delusion into a statement about everyone. We are all, the closing line suggests, pulled backward even as we strain forward, and Gatsby is simply the man who strained hardest and so was pulled back furthest.
This is also why Gatsby cannot be saved by getting Daisy. Even on the afternoon he wins her back, the dream begins to die, because the dream lived in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the not-yet. The green light burned brightest across the water. Once Daisy stood beside him, Nick notes, the colossal significance of that light vanished and it became again a green light on a dock, one of his enchanted objects diminished by one. Gatsby’s relationship to time guarantees this. A man who loves the reaching cannot survive arrival, because arrival is the death of reaching. The past he wants to restore is precious precisely because it is unreachable, and the instant anything becomes reachable it loses the quality that made him want it.
Gatsby’s Voice and Performance: How a Self-Made Man Speaks
A character analysis that ignores how Gatsby talks misses half the man, because Gatsby is a performance, and the performance lives in his speech. The most famous tic is the phrase he repeats relentlessly, calling everyone old sport, a borrowed bit of upper-class English manner that he wears like the pink suit. The phrase is a tell. It is too consistent, too deliberate, a verbal costume that announces a refinement Gatsby was not born into and is straining to project. Tom hears it instantly for what it is and mocks it in the Plaza, demanding to know where Gatsby picked up that expression, because Tom, secure in his old money, recognizes the sound of a man auditioning for a class he has not inherited.
The rehearsed autobiography in Chapter 4 is the performance at full stretch. Gatsby tells Nick he will give him God’s truth and then recites a life story so polished it sounds memorized, claiming to be the son of wealthy Midwesterners, all dead, educated at Oxford because his ancestors always were. The Oxford claim is the seam in the costume. Gatsby hurries the phrase, or swallows it, or chokes on it, as though it had bothered him before, and that hesitation tells Nick, and the reader, that the story is constructed and that Gatsby half-knows it will not hold. He produces props to shore it up, a medal from Montenegro engraved with his name, a photograph of himself at Oxford with a cricket bat, and the props are real enough but they function exactly as stage dressing, evidence marshaled to support a performance rather than facts shared in confidence.
What makes the performance tragic rather than merely fraudulent is that Gatsby is his own most convinced audience. The smile that reflects your best self back at you is the same faculty he turns on his own invented history, and he believes the role he is playing more completely than any spectator could. James Gatz wrote the part of Jay Gatsby and then vanished into it so thoroughly that there is no actor left backstage, only the role. This is why his speech can be both phony and sincere at once. The old sport is borrowed and the Oxford story is mostly a lie, yet the man delivering them is not cynically conning anyone; he is reciting the scripture of a self he has willed into being. The performance is the person. There is no truer Gatsby behind the act, which is the most unsettling thing the novel suggests about the self-made man: that a self made entirely by will may have nothing underneath it but the will itself, and that the costume, worn long enough and believed hard enough, becomes the only body the man has left.
Gatsby’s Arc Across the Nine Chapters
Gatsby’s arc is unusual because he barely changes; what changes is how much of him the reader can see. He enters as rumor, sharpens into a man, reaches his single goal, watches it dissolve, and dies still pointed at it. The movement is not from one self to another but from concealment to exposure, and the tragedy is that exposure reveals not a fraud but a believer.
In Chapter 1 he is only the gesture toward the light, glimpsed and gone. In Chapter 3 he is the host who does not drink, the legend who turns out to be a quiet young man with a borrowed phrase and a devastating smile. Chapter 4 deepens the mystery rather than solving it: Gatsby recites an autobiography so polished it sounds rehearsed, claims an Oxford education he hurries past as if it bothers him, produces a medal from Montenegro and a photograph as proof, and then, through Jordan, reveals the real engine under all of it, that he bought the house to be across the water from Daisy. The Wolfsheim lunch in the same chapter plants the criminal foundation, the gambler who fixed the World Series sitting beside the man who serves a vision of pure beauty.
Chapter 5 is the hinge, the reunion he has staged his whole adult life to reach. Gatsby is almost unbearably nervous, knocks over a clock, and passes, as Nick puts it, through embarrassment and unreasoning joy into a third state of wonder at having Daisy actually in his house. It is the peak of his arc and also the first crack, because the moment the dream is touched it begins to lose the magic distance that made it a dream. Chapter 6 supplies the origin, James Gatz and the Platonic conception, and the creed that you can repeat the past. Chapter 7 is the catastrophe: the Plaza confrontation where Tom exposes the bootlegging and Daisy retreats, the drive home, Myrtle’s death under Gatsby’s car with Daisy at the wheel, and Gatsby choosing to take the blame and stand watch outside the Buchanan house over nothing. In Chapter 8 he tells Nick the true Louisville story at last, and dies in his pool still oriented toward a phone call from Daisy that will never come. Chapter 9 is the aftermath, the empty funeral, Henry Gatz arriving with the boyhood schedule of self-improvement, and Nick’s closing verdict that lifts Gatsby above the rotten crowd.
To hold the whole man in view, it helps to anatomize him along four axes: what he desires, the method he uses to chase it, the contradiction built into him, and the fate that follows. This is the Gatsby character anatomy, and each axis has a single scene where it is decided.
| Axis | What it is | Decisive scene |
|---|---|---|
| Desire | Not Daisy alone but the recovery of the past she stands for, the five lost years rewound to Louisville | The Plaza, where he demands Daisy say she never loved Tom |
| Method | Self-invention funded by illicit wealth, a whole identity authored upward from nothing as bait for the dream | Chapter 6, James Gatz becoming Jay Gatsby, the Platonic conception |
| Contradiction | A genuine idealist whose means are criminal and whose beloved is a ghost the living woman cannot match | The Wolfsheim lunch beside the reaching toward the green light |
| Fate | Abandoned, blamed for a death he did not cause, dead in his pool, mourned by almost no one | The empty funeral against the crowded parties |
Does Gatsby change over the course of the novel?
Gatsby barely changes inwardly; the green light tells the story. Early it is a distant beacon, then an ordinary dock light once Daisy is near, then a symbol of all doomed striving. His belief never bends. What shifts is the reader’s access, from rumor to man to exposed believer.
The flatness of the arc is the point. A character who learned, who matured out of his illusion, would be a smaller figure. Gatsby’s refusal to revise is what makes him tragic in the classical sense, a man destroyed by the very quality that makes him remarkable. He dies believing, and that belief is both his greatness and his ruin.
The Passages That Define Gatsby
Three or four passages carry the whole character, and learning to read them is the difference between summarizing Gatsby and arguing about him. The first is the reaching gesture at the close of Chapter 1, where Gatsby stretches his arms toward the dark water and the single green light that might have been the end of a dock. The passage defines him because it gives you the man as posture before it gives you the man as person. Read the verb. He stretches, he reaches, he trembles. The grammar of the sentence is the grammar of his life.
The second is the smile in Chapter 3, the smile of eternal reassurance that believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself. The passage defines Gatsby’s effect on others and, more quietly, his effect on himself. He is a believing machine, and the smile is that machine turned outward. The same faculty that makes strangers feel seen is the faculty that lets Gatsby look at his own invented history and find it true.
The third is the Platonic conception passage in Chapter 6, where Fitzgerald tells us Jay Gatsby sprang from a conception of himself and served a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. This is the passage that converts Gatsby from a man with secrets into a symbol of self-creation, and it is the one to cite when you want to argue that the novel both admires and indicts the American dream. The admiration and the indictment are in the same sentence, in the gap between Platonic and meretricious. To follow the buried boy this passage reveals, the study of who Gatsby was before the invention reads James Gatz as a presence that never fully disappears.
The fourth is the repeat-the-past exchange in the same chapter, Gatsby crying that of course you can repeat the past as if the opposite were absurd. Quote this when you want to define his psychology in his own words. It is the thesis statement of his interior life, the belief that powers everything and dooms everything. And the fifth, for the verdict, is Nick’s shout across the lawn in Chapter 8, that the careless rich are a rotten crowd and Gatsby is worth the whole bunch put together. That line is the novel taking a side, and any defended reading of Gatsby has to reckon with why Nick, who began by reserving judgment, ends by elevating this self-invented bootlegger above everyone with cleaner hands. The pull between Gatsby’s devotion and his crimes is the whole subject of the debate over whether he is an idealist or a criminal, which weighs the evidence on both sides before reaching a verdict.
Is Gatsby a Hero or a Deluded Criminal? The Critical Debates
The major debate around Gatsby splits along a single fault line: is he a romantic hero whose greatness is earned, or a deluded criminal whose dream is a sentimental cover for fraud, bootlegging, and a stalker’s fixation on a married woman? Both readings have real textual support, and a strong Jay Gatsby character analysis does not pick a side and ignore the other. It holds both and then argues which one the novel finally endorses, and why the question cannot be cleanly resolved.
Is Gatsby a hero or just a deluded figure?
He is both, and the novel refuses to cancel either. Gatsby is genuinely criminal, a bootlegger tied to the man who fixed the World Series, and genuinely devoted, building his whole life around one hope. The book calls him great while showing the dream rests on a married woman who cannot bear its weight.
The hero reading leans on the gift for hope, the single-minded devotion, the refusal to grow cynical, and above all on Nick’s verdict. By this reading Gatsby’s crimes are incidental, the necessary means a poor boy used to make himself worthy, and the real Gatsby is the one reaching toward the light, a figure of almost spiritual aspiration in a corrupt world. His greatness is earned because he, alone among the cast, wants something larger than comfort and is willing to be destroyed for it.
The criminal reading leans just as hard on the bootlegging, the Wolfsheim connection, the lies about Oxford and a dead family, and the unsettling fact that the grand romance is a married woman pursued for five years by a man who bought a house to watch her dock. By this reading Gatsby is self-deluded at best and predatory at worst, a man who has confused obsession with love and rebranded a criminal fortune as devotion. His greatness, on this account, is ironic, a word Nick attaches to a figure who never deserved it, and the novel’s title is a carnival barker’s boast, Gatsby the Great as a stage act rather than an honest measure.
The strongest position refuses the either-or. Gatsby is fully a criminal by the law of his era and fully an idealist in his devotion, and Fitzgerald deliberately welds the two so neither cancels the other. The bootlegging does not undercut the romance; it deepens the tragedy, because it shows how far a poor boy had to twist himself to reach a dream that was rigged against him from birth. The delusion does not erase the heroism; it constitutes it, because Gatsby’s greatness was never sound judgment. It was the capacity to believe past all evidence, the same capacity that makes him a fool and a marvel in the same breath. The novel calls him great without irony and with irony at once, and that doubleness is not a flaw in the book. It is the book’s argument about what the American dream does to the people who believe in it most completely. Gatsby’s devotion is inseparable from the obsession that drives it, a fusion the study of Gatsby and Daisy as the anatomy of an obsession traces through the central relationship.
Close Reading: Three Scenes That Build the Whole Gatsby
Beyond the famous lines, three scenes do the heavy lifting of constructing Gatsby, and reading them closely is what separates an argument about him from a summary. The first is the shirt scene in Chapter 5. Having reunited with Daisy, Gatsby takes her through his mansion and, in his bedroom, begins pulling out shirts, soft rich shirts of linen and flannel in coral and apple green and lavender, tossing them in a growing pile until Daisy bends her head into them and begins to cry, sobbing that they are such beautiful shirts and that it makes her sad because she has never seen such beautiful shirts before. The scene is often read as Daisy’s materialism, and it is partly that, but it is more revealing about Gatsby. He is not showing off the shirts as wealth; he is offering them as proof that he has become the man worthy of her, that the five years were spent building exactly the self she should have waited for. The shirts are the dream made fabric, and Daisy’s tears, ambiguous and overdetermined, are the first sign that the real woman cannot fully inhabit the role the dream has written for her.
The second is the Dan Cody backstory in Chapter 6, the origin of the performance. At seventeen, James Gatz rowed out to a yacht anchored off the Lake Superior shore to warn its owner, the wealthy adventurer Dan Cody, of a coming wind, and Cody took the boy aboard. For the next several years Gatz served Cody in a dozen capacities and watched, up close, how a self-made man lived among money he had clawed out of silver and copper. Cody was the model, the living proof that a poor boy could become rich and grand, and the young Gatz absorbed the lesson and then improved on it, inventing a Gatsby smoother and more romantic than his coarse mentor. The scene matters because it locates the exact moment the verb began, the instant a North Dakota farm boy decided that the self he was born into could be discarded and a new one assembled. Everything later, the bootlegging, the mansion, the old sport, runs downstream from that rowboat.
The third is the Plaza confrontation in Chapter 7, where the dream meets its limit. In the sweltering hotel suite, Tom dismantles Gatsby in front of Daisy, exposing the bootlegging behind the respectable front and watching the polish crack. Gatsby, desperate, presses Daisy to declare she never loved Tom, to perform the erasure his whole project requires, and Daisy, cornered, admits she did love Tom once but loved Gatsby too. That small concession is fatal. Gatsby needed all or nothing, a clean restoration of the past, and a Daisy who loved both men is a Daisy living in real time rather than in his suspended Louisville. She turns on him and cries that he wants too much, and the line is the verdict of the breathing world on the demands of the dream. The reaching has asked for more than reality can supply, and from this scene forward Gatsby is a dead man walking, undone not by Tom’s exposure of his crimes but by the discovery that the past cannot be edited even with Daisy in the room agreeing to try.
Is Gatsby’s Greatness Earned or Ironic?
The last live question in the criticism is whether the novel’s title praises Gatsby or mocks him, and the honest answer is that it does both, deliberately and at once, which is harder to argue and more rewarding than picking a side. An established line of interpretation reads Gatsby as a late version of the self-made American figure, the poor boy who rises by will and embodies a national faith in reinvention, and on that reading his greatness is earned, the genuine article, a man who lived the dream more fully than anyone around him. A competing line reads the title as pure irony, Gatsby the Great as a magician’s billing, the grandeur of a bootlegger who built a counterfeit life and called it magnificent.
The text supports both because Fitzgerald wrote both into the same sentences. When Nick says Gatsby turned out all right at the end and that it was the foul dust trailing his dreams that disgusted him, he separates the man from the corruption around him and grants the man a kind of vindication. When Nick catalogs the lies, the criminal money, and the deluded fixation, he supplies every reason to read the greatness as a joke. The novel will not let you rest on either, because its actual subject is the inseparability of the two. Gatsby’s greatness is earned and ironic at the same time, earned because the gift for hope is real and rare, ironic because that gift attached itself to a married woman, a recoverable past, and a fortune from crime, none of which could bear its weight.
The strongest essay position, then, is not to resolve the irony but to argue for its function. Fitzgerald makes Gatsby’s greatness genuinely admirable and genuinely absurd because the American dream he embodies is itself both, a real and ennobling faith in self-creation and a delusion that the past can be rebuilt and the future bought. To call Gatsby simply great is to miss the indictment; to call him a mere fraud is to miss the wonder. The title means what it says and undercuts what it says in the same breath, and that doubled meaning is the whole achievement of the book compressed into two words. A reader who can hold the praise and the irony together, naming the textual evidence that pulls each way, has understood Gatsby better than either camp that insists on choosing.
Gatsby Against Tom: New Money and the Limits of Self-Invention
Gatsby comes into sharpest focus when set beside Tom Buchanan, because the two men are built as opposites that share an object. Tom is old money, East Egg, a body thick with inherited power and a worldview to match; Gatsby is new money, West Egg, a self assembled from nothing and pointed at the woman Tom married. The contrast is not incidental. Fitzgerald uses Tom to mark the exact boundary of what self-invention can and cannot buy, and that boundary is the cruelest fact in Gatsby’s life.
Money, it turns out, was the easy part. Gatsby acquired wealth that rivals Tom’s, a mansion grander than the Buchanan house, more cars, larger parties. What he could not acquire is the thing Tom was born holding: the unspoken security of belonging, the ease that does not have to be performed because it was never in doubt. Tom hears the borrowed old sport and the rehearsed Oxford story and knows instantly that he is dealing with an imitation, and in the Plaza he uses that knowledge like a blade, exposing the bootlegging and sneering that an Oxford man does not wear a pink suit. The pink suit is the whole argument in one garment. Gatsby can buy the suit; he cannot buy the instinct that would have told him not to wear it among people like Tom. Self-invention reaches the door of the old-money world and stops there, because the last membrane separating new wealth from inherited class is not money at all but a manner that can only be born into.
The contrast also exposes the moral asymmetry the novel cares about. Tom, who has done nothing to deserve his power, wields it carelessly and cruelly, conducting an open affair, breaking Myrtle’s nose without a flicker of conscience, and retreating into his wealth when the bodies start to fall. Gatsby, who built everything himself by illegal means, pours his whole self into one devotion and dies for it. The novel does not excuse Gatsby’s crimes, but it weighs them against Tom’s careless brutality and finds the self-made bootlegger the larger man. That verdict is the point of the pairing. Gatsby’s striving, criminal and deluded as it is, has a magnitude that Tom’s secure entitlement entirely lacks, and the difference is what Nick finally salutes when he calls Gatsby worth the whole rotten crowd. Set against Tom, Gatsby is the proof that the dream of self-making produces something more human than the inheritance it tries to crash into, even as it shatters against that inheritance.
The Pink Suit and the Silver Stars: Reading Gatsby in Color
Fitzgerald codes Gatsby in color as carefully as he codes the green light, and tracking the palette is a precise way into the character. Gatsby’s signature is a kind of luminous excess. His car is a rich cream color, bright with nickel, a vehicle so gaudy it becomes a death machine; his suit is pink, the suit Tom mocks and the one Nick remembers after the murder as a gorgeous pink rag against the white marble steps. The colors that cluster around Gatsby are showy, costly, and slightly off, never the muted tones of inherited taste but the bright, hopeful hues of a man performing arrival. The color tells you, before any dialogue does, that Gatsby is new, that his grandeur is recent and a little too eager.
The party scenes raise the palette to silver and gold, the metals of his wealth and his aspiration. His gardens glitter, the orchestra plays, and the night sky over his lawn is described in terms of a silver pepper of the stars, an image that fuses his ambition with the unreachable. Gold and silver are the colors of money in the novel, and Gatsby surrounds himself with them, but they are also the colors of distance, of things that shine because they are far away. The same logic governs the green light, green being the color of hope and of go, the permission to advance, attached to a beacon Gatsby can see but never close on.
Against all this brightness sits the white that clings to Daisy. She and Jordan first appear in white dresses on a couch, buoyant and weightless, and white follows Daisy as the color of a purity that is mostly surface, an innocence the novel steadily ironizes. Gatsby reaches from his bright, manufactured palette toward Daisy’s white, from the loud color of the self-made toward the pale color of the already-arrived, and the reach never closes the gap. Reading Gatsby in color confirms the larger reading. He is luminous, costly, and a half-step wrong, a man whose every shade announces both the height of his hope and the fact that the hope is borrowed, recent, and aimed at something whiter and more secure than he can become.
The Louisville Kiss: Where the Dream Was Sealed
The deepest single window into Gatsby is the flashback in Chapter 8, the memory of the night in Louisville when he first kissed Daisy, because it shows the exact instant the dream was sealed and the man was doomed. Walking with Daisy under a moonlit sidewalk, Gatsby feels that he could climb to a secret place above the trees and suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder, but only if he climbed alone. He knows, in other words, that to commit to Daisy is to give up a limitless, solitary possibility for one fixed object, and he chooses the object anyway.
Fitzgerald writes the choice as a fall from divinity into mortality. Gatsby knew that when he kissed this girl and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. The language is enormous and exact. Before the kiss, Gatsby’s imagination is godlike, capable of any future, romping without limit. The kiss binds that infinite imagination to a single perishable person, and the binding is irreversible. Then he kisses her, Daisy blossoms for him like a flower, and Nick says the incarnation was complete. Incarnation is the precise word. The boundless dream took flesh in one woman, and from that moment Gatsby’s limitless capacity for hope had exactly one address.
This is the scene that explains why winning Daisy could never satisfy him and why losing her could only destroy him. By wedding his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, Gatsby made a mortal woman the carrier of an immortal longing, a weight no living person could bear. The visions were the real beloved; Daisy was the vessel he poured them into. After that night, Nick observes, no amount of fire or freshness could challenge what a man stores up in his ghostly heart, and the ghost in Gatsby’s heart was the version of Daisy sealed under the Louisville moon. Everything that follows, the mansion, the parties, the reunion, the Plaza, is an attempt to make the breathing woman of 1922 match the ghost of 1917, and the attempt was hopeless from the moment of the kiss.
Gatsby and Nick: Why the Narrator Cannot Look Away
Gatsby’s character is inseparable from the man who reports it, because Nick Carraway is the lens that converts a bootlegger into a tragic hero, and understanding Gatsby means understanding why Nick cannot look away. Nick arrives in the East cynical and reserved, claiming to withhold judgment, and he spends the novel judging nearly everyone harshly, with one exception. Gatsby is the figure Nick chooses to defend, and the choice tells you as much about Gatsby’s effect as about Nick’s values.
What captures Nick is the gift for hope, the romantic readiness he says he has never found in any other person and never expects to find again. Nick is surrounded by people who feel nothing deeply enough to be ruined by it, and against that emptiness Gatsby’s total investment in a single dream registers as a kind of moral oxygen. Nick deplores the lies, sees through the old sport and the Oxford story, and disapproves of the bootlegging, yet he cannot dismiss a man whose capacity for wonder so far exceeds everyone around him. The famous shout across the lawn, that Gatsby is worth the whole rotten crowd, is Nick taking sides at last, and it is the novel’s verdict delivered through its narrator.
The pairing matters for any character analysis because it shows that Gatsby’s greatness is partly an effect of being witnessed by the right observer. A different narrator, colder or more literal, would have given us only the criminal and the fool. Nick gives us the believer, because Nick is the one person attuned to belief as a value. Gatsby needed a witness who could see past the costume to the reaching underneath, and the tragedy of the empty funeral is that almost no one else could. The careless crowd saw a host; Tom saw an upstart; Daisy saw, finally, a man who wanted too much. Only Nick saw the magnificence in the reaching, which is why the story survives as the story of a great man rather than a sordid one. Gatsby is, in the end, the figure his narrator could not stop loving, and that single sustained gaze is what lifts him out of the rotten crowd and into the title.
The Strongest Single Reading: The Man Who Is All Verb
If you carry one argument out of this study, carry this: Gatsby is defined not by who he is but by what he reaches for, so his character is best understood as an act of striving rather than a set of attributes. He is the man who is all verb. Strip away the mansion, the parties, the pink suit, and the borrowed accent, and what remains is not a hollow center but a motion, a reaching that began on a North Dakota farm and never stopped. This is why the costume reading fails. The costume is the by-product of the verb, the visible exhaust of a person organized entirely around wanting.
Reading him as all verb resolves the apparent contradictions without flattening them. His criminality and his idealism stop being in tension once you see that both serve the reaching. The bootlegging is how a poor boy acquired the means to keep reaching toward a dream that wealth gatekept. The idealism is the reaching itself, the refusal to accept that the past is closed. His love for Daisy and his indifference to the actual Daisy stop being a puzzle once you see that he loves the reaching toward her, the wedding of his visions to her breath in Louisville, more than he can love any breathing woman in 1922. Even his death fits. He dies oriented toward a phone that will not ring, still reaching, and the posture of his death is the posture of his first appearance, arms out toward a light across the water.
The tragedy of the man who is all verb is structural, not moral. He is not destroyed because he reached for the wrong thing. He is destroyed because the reaching grew larger than any object that could satisfy it, so that fulfillment became impossible by definition. The instant the green light became a real light on a real dock, it died as a dream. Gatsby’s hope was magnificent precisely because it could never be met, and a hope that can never be met must, sooner or later, break the person who holds it that hard. That is the novel’s most unsettling claim about the American dream: that the purest form of it, the form Gatsby embodies, is structurally suicidal, because it asks the future to deliver a restored past, and the future does not work that way.
This reading also explains why Nick elevates him. Nick does not admire Gatsby’s judgment, his honesty, or his methods, all of which Nick sees clearly and mostly deplores. Nick admires the capacity for the reaching, the gift for hope that he says he has never found in anyone else and never expects to find again. In a world of careless people who want nothing badly enough to risk anything, Gatsby is the one figure whose wanting is total. That totality is his greatness and his doom, and the novel refuses to separate them, because they are the same thing seen from two angles.
A Closing Verdict on Jay Gatsby
Who, finally, is Jay Gatsby? He is a poor boy who authored a self, funded it with crime, and aimed the whole construction at recovering a past that cannot be recovered, and he believed in that project so completely that the belief survived every disproof, including his own death. He is neither the simple romantic hero of the sentimental reading nor the mere fraud of the cynical one. He is a believer, and the novel asks you to hold his belief and his folly in the same hand, because Fitzgerald wrote them as inseparable. His greatness is real and his delusion is real, and the achievement of the book is to make you feel that the greatness depends on the delusion, that you cannot have the gift for hope without the blindness that comes with it.
For a writer building an essay on Gatsby, the usable thesis is the man who is all verb: argue that Fitzgerald constructs Gatsby as striving rather than as a fixed identity, support it with the reaching gesture, the Platonic conception, the repeat-the-past creed, and the death still pointed at Daisy, and pre-empt the objection that his crimes disqualify his greatness by showing that the novel deliberately welds the idealism to the criminality so neither cancels the other. That is an argument a reader can carry into a seminar or a dissertation, and it is what a plot-summary site cannot give you. To gather the scenes and quotations the argument rests on, you can read and annotate The Great Gatsby free on VaultBook, where the full annotated text, the close-reading tools, the character maps, and the searchable quotation bank let you trace Gatsby’s reaching across every chapter and pull the exact passages into your own notes. The library keeps growing, so the same workspace serves the next character you study and the next novel after that.
Gatsby ends the way he began, as a figure on the edge of the water with his arms out toward a light he cannot reach. The novel does not pity that posture and does not mock it. It holds it up as the truest and most dangerous version of a national faith, and then it lets the green light recede, as it always recedes, before the man who believed in it most.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Who is Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby?
Jay Gatsby is the title character of Fitzgerald’s novel, a fabulously wealthy young man who throws enormous parties at his West Egg mansion on Long Island in the summer of 1922. He is also an invention. Born James Gatz to poor North Dakota farmers, he renamed himself at seventeen and built an entire identity, funded by bootlegging, around the goal of becoming worthy of Daisy Buchanan, a woman he loved and lost five years earlier. Most of the novel’s events flow from his single decision to win her back. Read as a character, Gatsby is less a set of traits than a direction: a person organized completely around reaching for something out of reach. The narrator, Nick Carraway, who deplores almost everything Gatsby does, nonetheless ends by judging him worth more than the entire careless crowd around him.
Q: What does Jay Gatsby really want?
At the surface Gatsby wants Daisy, but his deeper want is stranger and more revealing. He wants to recover the past, to rewind the five years that separate him from the moment he first loved Daisy in Louisville, and he has fused the woman and the lost time into a single object he cannot separate. This is why, in the Plaza Hotel, he does not ask Daisy to leave Tom and build a future. He demands that she say she never loved Tom at all, deleting the marriage so the timeline can snap back. When Nick tells him you cannot repeat the past, Gatsby answers that of course you can, and he means it literally. His desire is for a reversal of time disguised as a romance, which is why no living woman, including the actual Daisy, could ever satisfy it.
Q: Is Gatsby a hero or a deluded figure?
He is both, and the novel refuses to separate the two. The heroic reading rests on his gift for hope, his single-minded devotion, and Nick’s verdict that he is worth the whole rotten crowd. The deluded reading rests on the bootlegging, the lies about his past, and the unsettling fact that his grand romance is a five-year fixation on a married woman. Fitzgerald welds these together on purpose. Gatsby’s greatness is not sound judgment; it is the capacity to believe past all evidence, which is the same capacity that makes him a fool. The delusion does not cancel the heroism, it constitutes it, because the gift for hope and the blindness are one trait seen from two sides. A strong reading holds both and argues that the novel calls him great with and without irony at once.
Q: What is Gatsby’s character arc across the novel?
Gatsby barely changes inwardly, which is the point; his arc is one of exposure rather than growth. In Chapter 1 he is only a figure reaching toward a green light. In Chapter 3 he sharpens into a quiet host with a famous smile. Chapter 4 deepens his mystery and plants the criminal foundation. Chapter 5 brings the reunion with Daisy, the peak of his hope. Chapter 6 reveals his origin as James Gatz and his creed that the past can be repeated. Chapter 7 is the catastrophe in the Plaza and the death of Myrtle. Chapter 8 ends with his murder in the pool, still oriented toward Daisy. Chapter 9 is the empty funeral. Across all of it his core belief never bends. What changes is how much of him the reader can see, from rumor to man to exposed believer.
Q: What central contradiction defines Gatsby’s character?
Gatsby is simultaneously a genuine idealist and a genuine criminal, and Fitzgerald refuses to let either reading win. He is a bootlegger tied to the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, a liar about his education and his family, and a man who bought a mansion to spy across the water at a married woman’s dock. He is also the most sincerely devoted figure in the book, organizing his entire life around a single hope and dying for a crime he did not commit to protect the woman he loves. The contradiction is not a flaw the novel resolves; it is the novel’s design. Gatsby’s idealism required the criminality, because a poor boy could not otherwise reach a dream that wealth gatekept, and his devotion is inseparable from the obsession that fuels it. Holding both at once is the heart of any honest reading.
Q: Why does the novel call Gatsby great?
The title works on at least two levels at once, and both are deliberate. On one level it is ironic, the boast of a carnival barker, Gatsby the Great as a stage act, since the man is a self-invented bootlegger whose grandeur is borrowed and whose mansion is a copy. On another level it is sincere. Gatsby is great in the one way the novel values, his capacity for hope, which Nick says he has never found in any other person. In a world of careless people who want nothing badly enough to be ruined by it, Gatsby’s wanting is total, and that totality lifts him above everyone with cleaner hands. Fitzgerald means both readings together. The greatness is real and the irony is real, and the book’s argument lives in the refusal to choose between them.
Q: How does Fitzgerald want the reader to feel about Gatsby?
Fitzgerald engineers a divided response, and the division is the intended effect. He filters Gatsby entirely through Nick, who sees the man’s dishonesty, his criminal ties, and his deluded fixation clearly and disapproves of all of it, yet cannot help admiring the gift for hope underneath. The reader is meant to inhabit that same split: to recognize that Gatsby is a fraud and a criminal, and to feel, against better judgment, that he is also the finest person in the book. This is not confusion on Fitzgerald’s part. It is the precise emotional architecture of the novel, designed so the reader experiences the seductive pull of the American dream and its hollowness at the same time. You are meant to mourn Gatsby while knowing exactly why his project was doomed and partly dishonest from the start.
Q: Why does Gatsby throw his enormous parties?
The parties look like social ambition and are nothing of the kind. Gatsby fills his mansion with hundreds of strangers every weekend for a single, hidden reason: the hope that Daisy Buchanan might one night wander in. The parties are a net cast across Long Island Sound to catch one fish, and the moment Gatsby reconnects with Daisy through Nick and Jordan, they stop entirely. He does not enjoy them, drinks little, and often watches from a distance or leaves early. The crowds who use his hospitality barely know him, and almost none of them attend his funeral, which is the novel’s quiet judgment on the whole spectacle. The parties reveal the gap between Gatsby’s apparent life and his real one: a vast public performance staged for an audience of one who never shows up the way he imagined.
Q: Why can the real Daisy never satisfy Gatsby?
Because Gatsby does not love the actual Daisy; he loves an idealized image of her stored five years earlier and inflated by longing ever since. Fitzgerald says it directly: even on the afternoon of their reunion, there were moments when Daisy fell short of his dreams, not through any fault of hers, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. The dream had outgrown its object. Nick observes that after Gatsby wedded his visions to Daisy’s breath in Louisville, no amount of fire or freshness could challenge what a man stores up in his ghostly heart. A breathing woman in 1922, married and a mother, cannot match a ghost built from five years of accumulated hope. The failure is not Daisy’s; it is structural, built into a desire aimed at a memory rather than a person.
Q: What makes Gatsby a tragic figure?
Gatsby is tragic in the classical sense: he is destroyed by the very quality that makes him remarkable. His gift for hope, the capacity to believe past all evidence, is both his greatness and the flaw that ruins him, and he never revises it. A character who learned, who matured out of his illusion, would be smaller and safer. Gatsby refuses to revise, demanding that the past be restored whole, and that refusal drives him to take the blame for Myrtle’s death, stand watch over a woman who has already abandoned him, and die in his pool still waiting for a call that will not come. The tragedy is structural rather than moral. He is not punished for reaching toward the wrong thing; he is destroyed because the reaching grew larger than any object that could satisfy it.
Q: How does Gatsby’s death reflect his character?
His death is the perfect emblem of his life because he dies still reaching. Gatsby waits by his pool for a phone call from Daisy that will never come, having taken the blame for Myrtle’s death to protect her, and he is shot by George Wilson under a misunderstanding Tom helped engineer. The posture of his death mirrors his first appearance: arms out, oriented toward something across the water that he cannot touch. He dies a believer, never having accepted that Daisy has chosen Tom and the past is closed. The emptiness that follows, the unattended funeral set against the crowded parties, completes the picture. The man who reached hardest is mourned by almost no one, because the world he tried to enter never valued the reaching the way he did, and the careless people who used him simply move on.
Q: Why does almost no one attend Gatsby’s funeral?
The empty funeral is Fitzgerald’s verdict on the world Gatsby tried to join. The hundreds who crowded his parties were never his friends; they were consumers of his hospitality who knew nothing real about him and felt no obligation once the spectacle ended. Daisy, the entire purpose of his life, sends no word and leaves town with Tom. The business associates tied to his bootlegging want nothing to do with a dead man’s exposure. Only Nick, Gatsby’s father Henry Gatz, and the man Nick calls Owl Eyes appear at the grave. The contrast between the packed parties and the deserted burial exposes the carelessness of the wealthy crowd and isolates Gatsby’s sincerity against their indifference. It is the moment Nick fully turns against the East, recognizing that the people who used Gatsby were not worth the man who chased them.
Q: Is Gatsby a sympathetic character?
Most readers find him deeply sympathetic, and Fitzgerald builds the novel to produce that response while complicating it. Gatsby is sincere in a world of frauds, devoted in a world of the careless, and willing to be destroyed for his hope, which makes him magnetic. Yet the sympathy is meant to coexist with clear sight of his flaws: the lies, the criminal money, the fixation on a married woman, the way he treats Daisy as a symbol rather than a person. Fitzgerald filters all of this through Nick, who feels the pull and names the problems at once. The intended response is not uncomplicated affection but a divided ache, admiration for the gift for hope braided with recognition of how deluded and dishonest its expression became. That division is the precise emotional effect the novel is engineered to create.
Q: What does Jay Gatsby symbolize in the novel?
Gatsby symbolizes the American dream of self-invention taken to its limit, both its grandeur and its rot. He is a poor boy who authored an entirely new self by will and money, which makes him the embodiment of the belief that a person can be remade from scratch. Fitzgerald frames this in Chapter 6 by saying Gatsby sprang from his Platonic conception of himself and served a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty, and the word meretricious, meaning showy but false, carries the indictment inside the praise. Gatsby’s success points constantly back to its own hollowness: the copied mansion, the uncut books, the borrowed name, the bootlegged fortune. He also carries the green light, the symbol of a striving that empties out the instant it is fulfilled. He stands for a dream that is real as desire and counterfeit as fact.
Q: How is Gatsby different from the other wealthy characters?
The crucial difference is the quality of his wanting. Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and the careless crowd around them, are people who want nothing badly enough to risk anything; their wealth is inherited or secure, and they retreat into it when trouble comes, leaving others to clean up the damage. Gatsby’s wealth is new, illicit, and entirely instrumental. He barely uses it for himself, deploying it as bait for a single hope. Where the old-money characters are defined by carelessness and self-protection, Gatsby is defined by a total, ruinous investment in one aim. That contrast is why Nick elevates him above the others: not because Gatsby is more honest or more lawful, which he is not, but because he is the one figure whose desire is real enough to destroy him, in a society built to feel nothing that deeply.
Q: Why does Nick admire Gatsby despite his flaws?
Nick admires one specific thing, and he is precise about it: Gatsby’s extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness Nick says he has never found in any other person and never expects to find again. Nick does not admire Gatsby’s honesty, his methods, or his judgment, all of which he sees clearly and mostly condemns. What earns his loyalty is the capacity for total belief in a world of people who believe in nothing. By the end Nick has turned against the East and its careless rich, and Gatsby becomes the exception that clarifies his disgust, the man whose sincerity throws the surrounding indifference into relief. That is why Nick shouts across the lawn that Gatsby is worth the whole bunch put together. He is judging the quality of Gatsby’s wanting against the emptiness of everyone with cleaner hands.
Q: Does Gatsby know his dream is impossible?
The novel keeps this productively ambiguous, and the ambiguity is part of his greatness. On one hand Gatsby seems entirely convinced, insisting to Nick that of course the past can be repeated and demanding in the Plaza that Daisy erase her marriage, behavior that only makes sense from a man who believes restoration is achievable. On the other hand there are flickers of doubt: the nervousness before the reunion, the moment the green light shrinks into an ordinary dock light once Daisy stands beside him, the sense Nick gives that some part of Gatsby registers the gap between the woman and the dream. The truest reading is that Gatsby half-knows and refuses to know, that his gift for hope is precisely the capacity to suppress the evidence against it. He does not believe because he is ignorant; he believes because believing is the whole of who he is, and to stop would be to dissolve.
Q: How should I write a character analysis essay about Gatsby?
Start with a thesis that treats Gatsby as a direction rather than a list of traits. The strongest available argument is that Fitzgerald constructs Gatsby as striving itself, the man who is all verb, defined by what he reaches for rather than who he is. Support it with four anchors: the reaching gesture toward the green light in Chapter 1, the Platonic conception passage in Chapter 6, the repeat-the-past creed in the same chapter, and the death still oriented toward Daisy in Chapter 8. Then pre-empt the obvious objection, that his crimes disqualify his greatness, by showing that the novel deliberately welds the idealism to the criminality so neither cancels the other. Avoid plot summary; build each paragraph around a quoted passage and an argument about it. That structure gives a grader analysis rather than recap, which is what earns the higher marks.
