Most readers finish The Great Gatsby hating Tom Buchanan and stop there, as if contempt were the same thing as understanding. A serious Tom Buchanan character analysis has to start somewhere harder. The central question is not whether Tom is awful, which the novel settles within a few pages, but why Fitzgerald built the cast’s least likable man as its most secure, and what it means that the one character who never grows is also the one the world never punishes. Tom is the husband Daisy will not leave, the man who keeps a mistress in plain sight, the voice that turns a dinner party into a lecture on race, and, at the end, the figure who points a grieving man toward Gatsby’s house and then drives off into a long untroubled life. To read him well is to see a deliberate construction, not a cartoon brute.
The temptation is to treat Tom as set dressing, the obstacle Gatsby has to get past to reach Daisy. That reading underrates him. Tom is not an obstacle so much as a fixed point, the thing the novel’s restless dreamers keep crashing against. Gatsby reinvents himself; Nick revises his judgments; Daisy wavers between two men. Tom does none of this. He arrives in Chapter 1 fully formed and exits in Chapter 9 unchanged, and that flatness is not a failure of characterization. It is the point Fitzgerald is making about the people who already hold everything and have no reason to become anyone else.
Tom Buchanan’s Function in the Novel
In the machinery of the plot, Tom is the immovable obstacle, but calling him only that flattens what he does on the page. He is the holder of the position Gatsby wants, and the entire green-light architecture of the book depends on Tom being already married to Daisy, already settled in East Egg, already in possession of the wealth and the name that Gatsby spends five years manufacturing a counterfeit of. Without Tom, Gatsby’s quest has no antagonist with weight. Anyone can outspend a rival; Gatsby cannot out-belong one. Tom’s function is to embody the thing money alone cannot buy, the inherited security that lets a person be careless without consequence.
He is also the novel’s engine of exposure. It is Tom who hires the detective, Tom who traces Gatsby’s fortune back to the drugstores and the bootlegging, and Tom who chooses the sweltering suite at the Plaza Hotel to detonate what he has found. The confrontation that breaks Gatsby’s dream is Tom’s doing, and it works not because Tom is clever but because he is sure. He knows, in a way Gatsby never can, that the social order is on his side. When he sneers that Gatsby is nobody, he is not bluffing. He is reporting the verdict of a world that was rigged in his favor before either man was born. The way the two men collide is mapped in detail in the study of how Gatsby and Tom function as foils, but the engine of the collision is Tom’s certainty.
Finally, Tom is the plot’s escape hatch for cruelty. After Myrtle dies under the wheels of Gatsby’s car and Wilson goes looking for the driver, it is Tom who supplies the address, sending a broken man toward Gatsby with the lie that Gatsby was behind the wheel. Tom never pulls a trigger and never has to. He arranges the deaths of two people through a few words and a careless instinct for self-preservation, then leaves town. His function, in the cold structural sense, is to show how violence travels through a man who will never be held to account for it.
What is Tom Buchanan’s role in the plot?
Tom is the obstacle Gatsby cannot overcome and the agent who exposes him. He holds Daisy, the marriage, and the old-money standing Gatsby wants, hires the detective who uncovers Gatsby’s bootlegging, breaks the dream at the Plaza, and finally steers Wilson toward Gatsby’s house, all without facing a single consequence.
How Fitzgerald Introduces Tom
Fitzgerald does not let the reader form an opinion of Tom slowly. The introduction in Chapter 1 is an act of compression, a portrait so loaded that nearly every later scene only confirms it. Nick describes a man of thirty, sturdy and straw-haired, with what Nick calls a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. The face is dominated by what Nick names two shining arrogant eyes, eyes that give Tom the look of always leaning aggressively forward. Before Tom speaks a full sentence, the physical description has already done the analytical work. Hardness, arrogance, aggression, a body angled toward the world as if to push it: this is characterization through the surface, and Fitzgerald trusts the surface because Tom is a man with no hidden depth to contradict it.
The body itself becomes an argument. Nick lingers on Tom’s physique, the great pack of muscle shifting under his coat, a frame he calls capable of enormous leverage. Then comes the harder phrase: a cruel body. Fitzgerald lets the word cruel attach not to an action but to flesh, as if cruelty in Tom is structural, built into him the way leverage is built into a lever. This is the first signal that Tom will not have a moral arc. You do not reform a body. You only watch it do what its shape allows.
The introduction also fixes Tom’s relationship to time. Nick tells us Tom had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven, a national figure in a way, and then delivers the quiet sentence that explains everything that follows: Tom is one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His peak is behind him. The rest of his life is a search for a feeling he had at college and will never have again. Nick later imagines that Tom will drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. That wistfulness is the closest the novel comes to granting Tom an inner life, and it is worth holding onto, because it complicates the easy reading of him as pure brute.
What does the reader’s first impression of Tom establish?
Fitzgerald introduces Tom through his body and his restlessness. Nick describes a sturdy, arrogant-eyed man with a cruel, powerful frame, a former football star whose peak is behind him. The portrait fixes Tom as hard, aggressive, and nostalgic before he finishes a sentence, so every later scene confirms rather than revises the first impression.
The setting of the introduction matters as much as the body. Tom stands on the front porch of a colonial mansion in East Egg, having drifted east in a way that, as Nick puts it, rather took your breath away, bringing a string of polo ponies up from Lake Forest. The detail is precise and damning. Tom does not need to do anything with his wealth except move it around for his own amusement. Polo ponies are leisure made visible, money spent on the performance of having always had money. East Egg itself is the geography of inheritance, the side of the bay where the established families live, and Tom’s house, with its lawn that seems to run toward the front door as if it cannot help itself, is the architecture of a man the world bends toward. The full weight of that geography belongs to the analysis of old money and new money, but the introduction already plants it.
What a Tom Buchanan Character Analysis Must Get Right
Any Tom Buchanan character analysis lives or dies on a handful of facts that the text fixes precisely, and getting them wrong is the fastest way to lose a reader’s trust. Tom is old money, not new. He did not build his fortune; he inherited it, and the distinction is the load-bearing wall of his entire characterization. He keeps Myrtle Wilson as a mistress, an arrangement he conducts with so little discretion that he takes her calls during dinner and rents her an apartment in the city. He breaks Myrtle’s nose with his open hand at the Chapter 2 party, a single sentence of violence that the analysis must quote and weigh rather than soften. He exposes Gatsby’s bootlegging at the Plaza in Chapter 7, having hired a detective to dig it up. And he sends Wilson toward Gatsby at the end, escaping every consequence while two people die. Misstate any of these and the reading collapses, because each one is a pillar the argument rests on.
Two further accuracies are worth guarding. First, Tom’s racism is textual and specific, not a vague unpleasantness. In Chapter 1 he praises a book about the supposed decline of the dominant race and frets that other races will seize control, and the bigotry is woven into his sense of his own supremacy rather than tacked on. The full reading of that ideology belongs to the analysis of Tom’s power, race, and brutality, but a character study cannot pretend the racism is incidental; it is the same controlling instinct as everything else he does. Second, Tom is not stupid. The lazy shorthand of the dumb athlete misses how shrewd he becomes the moment his position is threatened, and an analysis that condescends to Tom’s intelligence will misjudge how dangerous he is.
There is also a sequencing fact that anchors the whole portrait. The novel unfolds across a single summer, the summer of 1922, and Tom’s behavior is consistent from the first dinner to the final retreat, which is precisely what makes the no-arc reading defensible. He is not corrupted over the course of the book and he does not deteriorate; he is the same man at the start and the end, and the events that transform everyone around him leave him untouched. A reader who keeps the timeline straight will see that the stability is not an oversight but a designed constant, the fixed background against which the dreamers burn out.
Is Tom Buchanan old money or new money?
Tom is unambiguously old money. He inherited his wealth rather than earning it, lives in established East Egg, and carries the unworried confidence of generational riches. This sets him against Gatsby, whose fortune is freshly and illegally made, and the contrast between inherited and self-made wealth drives their conflict.
Hold these anchors in place and the interpretive work has a foundation. The danger in writing about a character readers already dislike is that the dislike does the thinking for you, and the analysis drifts into a catalogue of Tom’s bad qualities without an argument about why Fitzgerald assembled them this way. The facts are the discipline. Tom inherited, Tom strayed, Tom struck, Tom exposed, Tom escaped: that sequence, stated accurately, is already most of the case that his security and his cruelty are the same thing seen from two angles.
The Psychology of Tom Buchanan: What Does He Want?
The question of what Tom wants is harder than it looks, because Tom appears to want nothing. He has the wife, the money, the house, the mistress, and the standing. A character who lacks nothing should have no engine, and yet Tom is one of the most active forces in the book. The resolution is that Tom does not want to acquire. He wants to keep, and keeping turns out to be a more aggressive project than wanting.
What Tom wants is for the arrangement that favors him never to change. He wants Daisy as a possession and Myrtle as a diversion, and he wants both without having to choose, because choosing would mean acknowledging a limit on his appetite. He wants the social hierarchy that places him at the top to stay exactly where it is, which is why a faddish book about race can send him into a sweat at his own dinner table. Tom is not curious or ambitious. He is territorial. Everything he does, from the affair to the detective work to the lie that kills Gatsby, is the behavior of a man defending a perimeter.
This is why the famous racial panic in Chapter 1 is so revealing of his psychology rather than just his politics. Tom announces that civilization is going to pieces, recommends a book he has half-digested about the so-called dominant race, and warns that if they are not careful these other races will have control of things. The depth of his bigotry, and its link to his brutality, belongs to the analysis of Tom’s power, race, and brutality, but for a character study the key observation is psychological. Tom’s racism is the same instinct as his jealousy and his cruelty, scaled up to civilization. He experiences any challenge to his position, in his marriage or in the world, as an existential threat, because his entire identity is the position. Take away the certainty that he sits on top, and there is nothing underneath.
What is Tom Buchanan’s core motivation?
Tom wants to keep what he already has rather than acquire anything new. He wants Daisy and Myrtle at once, his social standing left untouched, and the hierarchy that favors him preserved. His aggression, his jealousy, and even his racial panic are all forms of defending a perimeter, the behavior of a man whose identity is entirely his position.
His relationship with Daisy exposes the same logic. Tom is unfaithful from the start; the affair with Myrtle is only the current installment, and Nick hears about an earlier scandal involving a chambermaid. Yet Tom is genuinely shaken when he realizes Daisy might leave him for Gatsby, and his reaction at the Plaza is not the cold maneuvering of a strategist but the heat of a man whose property is being touched. He insists, in the same breath that he admits his sprees, that he always comes back and that in his heart he loves Daisy all the time. The line is meant to be self-serving and it is, but it is also sincere in Tom’s terms. He does love Daisy, the way a man loves a thing he owns and cannot imagine losing. The contradiction is not hypocrisy he is hiding. It is hypocrisy he genuinely does not notice, because the rules that bind other people have never seemed to apply to him.
Tom’s intelligence sits inside this same frame. He is not stupid, and it is a misreading to play him as a dumb jock. He reads, however badly, and he is shrewd enough to hire a detective and to recognize Gatsby’s bootlegging for what it is. But his intelligence is entirely instrumental and defensive. He thinks well only when his position is threatened, and the rest of the time his mind idles in nostalgia and grievance. He is clever the way a guard dog is clever, alert to intrusion and useless at anything else.
Tom Buchanan’s Symbolic Weight: Old Money Made Flesh
If Gatsby is the new money that built itself overnight and can be unbuilt as fast, Tom is the old money that does not have to prove anything because it was never in doubt. His symbolic weight in the novel is enormous precisely because he carries it so lightly. Gatsby’s wealth is a performance, all parties and shirts and rumors; Tom’s wealth is a fact, expressed in polo ponies and a house and the bored confidence of a man who has never once worried about money. The contrast between the two kinds of wealth is the spine of the whole book, traced fully in the analysis of old money and new money, and Tom is the human face of the older, harder side.
What he symbolizes is not wealth as such but the security wealth buys when it has been there long enough to feel like nature. Tom embodies the difference between having money and being money. Gatsby has money and is still, to Tom, Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. Tom is money, in the sense that the social order recognizes him on sight, defers to him by reflex, and protects him without being asked. This is why his cruelty is so casual. A man who has never faced a consequence does not develop the inner brake that consequence installs in everyone else. Tom’s carelessness is not a personality quirk. It is the symptom of a life lived entirely inside a safety net he cannot see because he has never fallen.
What is Tom Buchanan’s symbolic function?
Tom represents old-money privilege at its most secure and least examined. Where Gatsby’s new wealth is a fragile performance, Tom’s inherited standing is treated as a fact. He embodies the security that lets a person be careless without paying for it, which is why his cruelty becomes the novel’s sharpest indictment of his class.
The symbolism deepens when you notice that Tom is the only major character who never reaches toward anything. Gatsby reaches for the green light, Nick reaches for moral clarity, Myrtle reaches for the class above her, Wilson reaches for an explanation that will make his loss bearable. They are all, in their different registers, dreamers. Tom alone has arrived. He stands at the destination the others strain toward, and what the novel shows, through him, is that the destination is hollow. The man who has everything the dreamers want is the worst person in the book. Fitzgerald could have made the inheritor charming and let the critique stay gentle. By making him cruel, dull, and frightened of a library book, the novel argues that the prize at the top of the American ladder is not worth the climb, because the people already up there are Tom.
Tom Buchanan and the Performance of Dominance
Tom understands the world as a contest for control, and he experiences nearly every interaction as a chance to win one. This is the through-line that connects his body, his speech, and his politics, and reading it makes sense of behavior that otherwise looks merely boorish. Tom does not converse; he commands. At the Chapter 1 dinner he physically arranges people, turning Nick around with a hand on the arm, and he steers the talk toward subjects where he can hold forth. His hospitality is a form of pressure, a way of making the room revolve around him. Even his restlessness is a search for dominance, the wistful hunt Nick describes for the dramatic turbulence of a game he can no longer play, because dominance on the football field was the one arena where Tom’s appetite and the world’s rules briefly agreed.
The body is the instrument of this dominance, and Fitzgerald never lets the reader forget it. The frame Nick calls capable of enormous leverage is not idle description; leverage is exactly what Tom applies to everyone around him. He uses his size the way other men use rank, a standing threat that rarely needs to be carried out because its presence is enough. When the threat does become action, as with Myrtle’s nose, it is performed with the casual competence of an athlete, a deft movement rather than a loss of control. This is the crucial point about Tom’s violence as a feature of his character rather than his ideology: it is not rage. Rage would imply that the world had gotten to him. Tom’s violence is closer to administration, the maintenance of an order he assumes is his to enforce.
His relationship to ideas follows the same pattern. Tom does not think in order to understand; he thinks in order to dominate, and ideas are useful to him only as weapons. The race book he half-reads is attractive precisely because it dresses his sense of supremacy in the borrowed authority of science, giving his prejudice the costume of fact. He deploys it at dinner not to persuade but to assert, to put a frame around the table that places himself and his guests on the safe side of a threatened line. The same instinct runs through his treatment of Gatsby at the Plaza, where Tom reaches for the language of social fact, the unanswerable claim that Gatsby is nobody from nowhere, because a fact, unlike an argument, cannot be contested by a man without standing.
Why is Tom Buchanan so aggressive?
Tom experiences nearly every interaction as a contest for control, so aggression is his default rather than an occasional lapse. His size, his commanding speech, and his weaponized ideas are all instruments of dominance. Having peaked as a college athlete, he spends his life seeking the control he once found on the field.
What makes this performance of dominance chilling rather than merely tiresome is that it works. The world Tom moves through is built to reward exactly this behavior, to mistake his certainty for authority and his belonging for virtue. He is never corrected because the people with the power to correct him are people like him. The performance of dominance is not a flaw Tom would be better off without; it is the precise behavior his position selects for and protects, which is why the analysis keeps circling back to the same grim conclusion. Tom is not a man who happens to be cruel. He is the kind of man his world manufactures when it removes every check on a cruel one.
Reading the Chapter 1 Dinner Closely
The dinner at the Buchanans’ is where the abstract portrait becomes lived behavior, and slowing down over it repays the effort. The scene is staged like a small theater of class, the candles lit and then, tellingly, snuffed by Daisy with a complaint that there is nothing to look forward to, an early note of the boredom that wealth has bred in this house. Into that boredom Tom injects his anxiety, the race talk that breaks the surface of polite conversation and reveals the fear underneath the confidence. The juxtaposition is deliberate. Tom has everything and is frightened, and the dinner lets the reader watch the two facts sit together at the same table.
The interruption of the telephone is the scene’s quiet masterstroke. Myrtle calls, the meal stops, and the marriage’s central arrangement is exposed without a word of direct explanation, because everyone present already knows. Jordan whispers the situation to Nick, and the casualness of the disclosure tells us how routine the affair has become, how thoroughly Tom’s appetite is accommodated by the people around him. Daisy follows Tom out, returns brittle and bright, and the surface reseals. Nothing is confronted, because in Tom’s world confrontation is for people who lack the power to avoid it. The dinner ends with the social machinery intact and the reader newly aware of how much that machinery is built to absorb on Tom’s behalf.
This scene also plants the comparison that organizes the novel, the contrast between the established Buchanan world and the striving one across the bay. Tom belongs here without effort; the house, the lawn, the servants, the bored wife are all simply his, the natural extension of a name. The reader who carries this into the later analysis of old money and new money will see that Gatsby’s parties, for all their splendor, are trying to manufacture what this dinner already possesses and does not even enjoy. The dinner is wealth at rest, and wealth at rest, in Tom’s hands, is a low hum of cruelty and fear.
Tom Buchanan Across the Nine Chapters
Tracking Tom through the novel’s nine chapters confirms by accumulation what the no-arc reading argues in the abstract: he is the same man on every page he appears, and the events that reshape the others slide off him. In Chapter 1 he is introduced at full strength, the cruel body, the arrogant eyes, the race talk, the mistress on the telephone, a portrait so complete that the rest of the book has only to confirm it. He is already, in the first scene, everything he will be in the last.
Chapter 2 moves Tom from his own polished house to the gritty stage of the valley of ashes and the city apartment, and the change of setting only widens the range of his command. He drags Nick along to meet Myrtle, treats Wilson with open contempt, presides over the squalid little party, and ends the chapter by breaking Myrtle’s nose. The brutality is new to the reader but not to Tom; it is simply the first time the novel lets us watch the violence that the first chapter only implied. Chapters 3 through 5 keep Tom largely offstage while Gatsby and Daisy reconnect, and his absence is itself meaningful. The dream can only flower while the obstacle is looking the other way, and the reader feels Tom’s eventual return as a gathering inevitability.
He returns in Chapter 6, dropping by Gatsby’s and then attending a party with Daisy, and his presence instantly changes the temperature. Tom is suspicious, possessive, and dismissive of the new-money spectacle around him, and he begins the detective work that will arm him later. By Chapter 7 he is fully reengaged and lethal, orchestrating the Plaza confrontation and winning it without a blow. Chapters 8 and 9 hand him the role of unmoved survivor: he steers Wilson, leaves town, and reappears only to justify himself to Nick on Fifth Avenue. Across all nine chapters there is no inflection point, no scene where Tom is forced to reconsider anything. He simply persists, and the persistence is the portrait.
Does Tom Buchanan appear throughout the whole novel?
Tom is present at the novel’s start and end and at every major turning point, though he recedes in the middle chapters while Gatsby and Daisy reconnect. His absence there lets the dream flower, and his return in Chapters 6 and 7 reasserts the obstacle. Tracking him chapter by chapter shows a character who never changes, only reappears.
What the chapter walk reveals is that Fitzgerald uses Tom’s appearances as a kind of structural metronome. When Tom is on the page, the world’s hard rules are in force and the dream is in retreat; when he steps off, the dream advances. He functions almost like gravity, an always-present force that the lighter material of Gatsby’s hope can briefly escape but never overcome. This is why a reader who maps Tom across the nine chapters comes away with a clearer sense of the novel’s shape than one who tracks any other character, because Tom marks the boundary between what the dreamers wish and what their world allows. The events of the timeline turn around him precisely because he is the part of the timeline that does not move.
The Character With No Arc: Power That Never Has to Grow
Here is the claim this analysis defends, the one a reader should carry out of the article and into an essay: Tom Buchanan is the one major character in The Great Gatsby with no arc, and his flatness is not a weakness in the novel but its sharpest structural argument. Call it power that never has to grow. Every other principal is altered by the summer of 1922. Gatsby is destroyed by it. Nick is so changed he flees east-coast life entirely. Daisy is forced, however briefly, to confront a version of her life she did not choose, and Myrtle and Wilson are killed. Tom passes through the same events and comes out the other side exactly as he went in, a little sweatier at the Plaza, a little teary about Daisy for an afternoon, and then restored to the smooth and untroubled surface of a man for whom nothing has actually happened.
This is deliberate. A lesser novel would have given Tom a comeuppance, a flicker of remorse, a lesson learned, because that is what stories are supposed to do to their villains. Fitzgerald refuses, and the refusal is the meaning. Tom does not change because he does not need to. Change is what the world demands of people who are subject to it, and Tom is not subject to the world; the world is subject to Tom. To grant him an arc would be to pretend that consequence reaches him, which would be a lie about how his kind of power actually works. The flat character is the honest character here. The reader who wants Tom to suffer is wanting the wrong novel, one where the social order corrects itself. Gatsby refuses that comfort. The way Tom’s static security plays against Gatsby’s doomed striving is developed in the study of the two men as foils, but the static quality is fully Tom’s own.
Does Tom Buchanan ever truly change?
No. Tom is the one major character with no arc. He begins the novel arrogant, cruel, and secure, and he ends it the same way, briefly rattled at the Plaza but never altered. Fitzgerald withholds any growth or comeuppance on purpose, because consequence never reaches a man whose inherited power the world is built to protect.
There is one moment that tests the no-arc reading, and an honest analysis has to face it. At the Plaza, when Daisy’s loyalty wavers, Tom is not composed. He is frightened, his voice rises, and for a few pages he is a man who might lose. Nick even registers something like sympathy. But notice what the scene actually proves. Tom is shaken not because he has grown a conscience but because his possession is being challenged, and the moment he wins it back, the fear evaporates without a trace. By the time the cars leave the city, Tom has reorganized the afternoon into a story where he was wronged and is now magnanimous. The flicker of vulnerability is real, but it leaves no residue. That is the test of a static character: not that he never feels anything, but that nothing he feels ever changes who he is.
The Passages That Define Tom Buchanan
Four scenes carry the whole character, and reading them closely is what separates an argument about Tom from an opinion about him. The first is the Chapter 1 dinner, where the introduction’s physical portrait turns into behavior. Tom dominates the table, steers the conversation toward his racial theories, takes a phone call from his mistress in the next room without embarrassment, and physically moves people around with a hand on the arm. The scene establishes that Tom’s cruelty is not occasional but ambient, the weather of any room he is in. Even his hospitality is a form of pressure.
The second is the Chapter 2 party at the apartment Tom keeps for Myrtle, which ends with the single most concentrated image of his character in the book. When Myrtle taunts him by chanting Daisy’s name, Tom, making a short deft movement, breaks her nose with his open hand. The economy of the sentence matters. There is no buildup and no aftermath of guilt, just a deft movement, the adjective doing terrible work, as if violence were a skill Tom performs the way he once played football. The whole truth of Tom is in that deftness. He hurts people the way other men sign their names, casually and well. The deeper reading of this violence belongs to the analysis of Tom’s brutality, but as a defining passage it tells a character study everything.
The third is the Plaza Hotel confrontation in Chapter 7, Tom’s masterpiece and the novel’s. Cornered by the possibility of losing Daisy, Tom does not fight with his fists. He fights with his belonging. He exposes Gatsby’s bootlegging, mocks the pink suit, and reduces a man who has built an empire to court Daisy into Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. The line lands because Tom is the one person in the room with the standing to make it stick. He also performs his own injured virtue, admitting that once in a while he goes off on a spree and makes a fool of himself but always comes back, insisting that in his heart he loves Daisy all the time. The hypocrisy is total and Tom does not feel it, and that obliviousness is the scene’s deepest revelation.
Where is Tom Buchanan’s character most fully exposed?
The Plaza Hotel confrontation in Chapter 7 reveals Tom most completely. There he defeats Gatsby not with force but with belonging, exposing his bootlegging and dismissing him as a nobody, while excusing his own affair as a harmless lapse. The scene shows Tom’s weapon is social certainty and his blind spot is a hypocrisy he genuinely cannot see.
The fourth is the aftermath of the deaths, told briefly and devastatingly. Tom, having steered Wilson toward Gatsby, leaves town with Daisy. When Nick meets him on Fifth Avenue months later, Tom is unrepentant and even aggrieved, certain he behaved correctly. Nick’s verdict is famous: Tom and Daisy were careless people who smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness, leaving others to clean up the mess. The retreat is the final proof of the no-arc reading. Tom does not flee in shame. He simply withdraws into the cushioned life that was always waiting, the deaths behind him already shrinking into an unpleasant memory of a summer.
To make the anatomy of the character usable, the four facets and their decisive scenes can be set side by side. Call it the Tom Buchanan Anatomy, the map of how privilege, cruelty, hypocrisy, and security each find their defining moment.
| Facet of Tom | What it looks like | The decisive scene | What it proves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Privilege | Inherited wealth worn as nature, polo ponies and a house the lawn runs toward | Chapter 1 introduction in East Egg | His standing is a fact the world recognizes on sight, not a thing he earns |
| Cruelty | Violence performed casually, as a skill | Breaking Myrtle’s nose in Chapter 2 | Hurting people costs him nothing and leaves no guilt |
| Hypocrisy | Condemning in others what he does freely | The Plaza confrontation in Chapter 7 | He does not hide his double standard; he cannot perceive it |
| Security | Untouched by the consequences he causes | The careless retreat in Chapter 9 | Power that never has to grow because it is never held to account |
The table is not decoration. It is the argument in compressed form, and a student can lift any row of it into an essay paragraph, pairing the facet with the scene and the proof. Readers who want to gather these scenes in full can read and annotate The Great Gatsby free on VaultBook, where Tom’s lines and the passages around them sit inside the complete annotated text with close-reading tools for tracking a single character across the chapters.
The Plaza Confrontation, Read Closely
The Chapter 7 showdown in the overheated suite at the Plaza is the scene where everything Tom is converges, and it deserves a slower reading than the plot summary gives it. The heat is the first thing to notice, the oppressive city warmth that presses on everyone and frays their composure. Into that pressure Gatsby makes his move, declaring that Daisy never loved Tom, and for a moment the dream seems about to win. What follows is the demonstration that the dream was always overmatched, not because Gatsby is weaker but because the contest was never the romantic one he believed he was fighting.
Tom does not respond to Gatsby’s claim about love with a claim of his own about love. He changes the subject to who Gatsby is, because that is the ground on which Tom cannot lose. He produces the bootlegging, the drugstores, the partnership with shady men, the whole counterfeit foundation of Gatsby’s fortune, and he watches the revelation do its work on Daisy. The genius of the attack, from Tom’s side, is that it does not require him to be a better man. It requires only that he be a more established one. When Tom calls Gatsby nobody from nowhere, he is not insulting him so much as informing him, reporting a social fact that the room, including Daisy, cannot finally ignore. Belonging beats longing, and Tom has belonging to spare.
The scene’s deepest revelation is the moment Tom turns magnanimous. Having won, he pivots almost instantly to generosity, urging the others to head home and even sending Daisy back in Gatsby’s car as a kind of trophy gesture, a public sign that he is so secure he can afford to be gracious. This is the no-arc reading in miniature. Tom passes through real fear and emerges, within the same scene, not changed by it but confirmed in it, his confidence not merely restored but enlarged. He also slips in his self-defense, the admission that he goes off on a spree now and then but always comes back, loving Daisy in his heart all the time, a sentence that asks the room to forgive in him exactly what he refuses to forgive in Gatsby. The hypocrisy is delivered without a flicker of awareness, and that absence of awareness is the point. Tom does not get away with the double standard by hiding it. He gets away with it because his world has never once asked him to see it.
By the time the cars leave the Plaza, the outcome of the novel is effectively settled, and Tom has not lifted a hand. He has won with words and standing alone, which is the most precise demonstration the book offers of where real power lies. Gatsby will die for a collision he did not cause; Tom will drive home to dinner. The scene is the hinge of the plot, and it turns entirely on Tom’s certainty that the order of things is his to invoke.
How Tom Buchanan Has Been Read
Tom has a long life in the criticism, and knowing the main lines of interpretation lets a reader enter the conversation rather than reinvent it. The most durable reading is the one this analysis defends and sharpens, the view of Tom as the embodiment of the careless rich, the human form of inherited privilege that smashes things and retreats into money. This reading takes its cue directly from Nick’s closing verdict and treats Tom and Daisy as a matched pair, two people whose wealth has freed them from the consequences that discipline everyone else. It is the reading that makes Tom a social diagnosis rather than a personal villain.
A second line, broadly a Marxist or class-focused interpretation, reads Tom as the enforcer of an economic order. In this view Tom’s racism, his cruelty toward Wilson and Myrtle, and his contempt for Gatsby are all functions of class power defending itself, the visible behavior of a system that keeps the people below it in their place. This is an established line of interpretation rather than the property of any single named critic, and it pairs naturally with the analysis of old money and new money, where the structural reading of class is worked out in full. It is useful precisely because it resists the temptation to make Tom merely a bad individual; it insists that he is a position the economy fills.
A third strand reads Tom through the lens of masculinity and the anxieties of the postwar moment, seeing in his physical dominance, his nostalgia for football, and his terror of social change a portrait of a particular kind of threatened manhood. On this reading, Tom’s aggression is partly compensation, the response of a man whose peak is behind him and who senses, beneath the bluster, that the world he rules is slipping. This interpretation gives the most weight to the wistful note in Nick’s portrait, the irrecoverable game, and it is the reading most willing to find a sliver of pathos in Tom without excusing him.
These readings do not cancel one another; they stack. Tom can be the careless inheritor, the class enforcer, and the anxious aging athlete at once, and the strongest essays hold more than one of these in view. What unites them is the recognition that Tom is a type rather than an accident, a figure Fitzgerald built to carry an argument about power, class, and consequence. The reader who knows the tradition can then take a position within it, which is what separates analysis from summary. The point is never to recite the readings but to choose among them and defend the choice with the text, and the text, on Tom, is unusually clear about where its sympathies do not lie.
It helps to notice what these competing readings refuse to do, which is reduce Tom to a single tidy label. The careless-rich reading resists turning him into a cartoon, the class reading resists treating him as a private failing, and the masculinity reading resists letting his pathos excuse his conduct. Each one, in its way, guards against the easy hatred that short-circuits real analysis. A student who borrows from all three ends up with a Tom who is fully condemned and fully explained at once, which is exactly the balance the novel strikes. The condemnation is total, but it is earned through understanding rather than asserted through distaste, and that is the difference between writing about Tom and merely disliking him.
Tom Buchanan and the Wilsons
Tom’s treatment of George and Myrtle Wilson exposes the class contempt that underlies his charm, and it is where the cost of his carelessness is finally counted in bodies. George Wilson runs a garage at the edge of the valley of ashes, and Tom treats him with a casual cruelty that is almost worse than active malice because it is so unthinking. He dangles the promise of selling Wilson a car, using the man’s hope as a lever to keep access to Myrtle convenient, and he speaks to Wilson the way a man speaks to a fixture, something useful and beneath notice. Wilson is, to Tom, scenery, a feature of the landscape that happens to come with a wife worth borrowing.
Myrtle fares no better in the long run, despite the apartment and the gifts. Tom keeps her in a separate compartment of his life, a diversion to be enjoyed and managed, and when she presses against the boundary, chanting Daisy’s name as if she had any claim on it, he breaks her nose without a second thought. The violence reveals the exact limit of Myrtle’s value to him. She may have the apartment and the dog and the dress, but she may not forget her place, and the instant she does, Tom corrects her with his hand. The affair, examined in full in the analysis of Tom and Myrtle, is from his side never anything but a controlled indulgence, and Myrtle’s tragedy is partly that she mistakes it for a door into Tom’s world when it is only a room he rents.
The deaths in the final chapters complete the picture. Myrtle is killed by Gatsby’s car, driven by Daisy, but the chain that leads there is one Tom helped forge, and the lie that follows is purely his. When the grieving, half-mad Wilson comes to him looking for the owner of the car, Tom points him toward Gatsby, knowing or not caring what Wilson will do. Two people die, and Tom’s only injury is the inconvenience of leaving town. He has used the Wilsons as he uses everyone beneath him, as instruments of his comfort, and when they break under the use, he steps over them and walks on.
This is the cruelty that the careless-rich reading is finally about. Tom does not hate the Wilsons; hatred would grant them a significance they do not have for him. He simply does not register them as fully real, as people whose lives weigh the same as his own, and that failure of registration is more dangerous than hatred because it never hesitates. A man who hated the Wilsons might have stopped to consider them. Tom, who barely sees them, does not. The novel places the bodies of two poor people at the end of a chain that begins in Tom’s appetite and ends in his retreat, and it asks the reader to notice that the man at both ends of that chain feels nothing has happened to him at all.
Critical Debates: Is Tom Buchanan Just a Villain?
The most common move in classroom discussion is to label Tom the villain and move on, and the most useful corrective is to ask whether villain is even the right word. A villain, in the usual sense, is a force of active malevolence, someone who schemes toward harm because harm is the goal. Tom does not scheme toward harm. He scheme toward comfort, and the harm is collateral. He breaks Myrtle’s nose not as part of a plan but as a reflex when she annoys him. He sends Wilson to Gatsby not out of a calculated wish to see Gatsby dead but because, in the moment, it is the answer that protects Tom and removes a problem. The distinction matters because it makes Tom worse, not better. A villain at least takes his cruelty seriously enough to choose it. Tom’s cruelty is beneath choosing. It is the ordinary exhaust of a man optimizing for himself, and a novel about the careless rich needs exactly that, an antagonist whose damage is incidental to him.
This is where reading Tom as a simple villain fails the text. The simple-villain reading lets the reader off too easily, because villains are aberrations and Tom is meant to be a type. Fitzgerald is not warning against monsters. He is warning against a class, and the warning only works if its representative is recognizably ordinary in his world, the sort of man East Egg produces and protects by the dozen. Tom’s horror is that he is normal for his station. Make him a scheming monster and you have a thriller; keep him a careless inheritor and you have an indictment.
Is “villain” the right word for Tom Buchanan?
Tom functions as the antagonist, but calling him a villain understates the critique. He does not scheme toward harm; he optimizes for his own comfort, and the damage to others is collateral. That carelessness is worse than active malice, because it makes Tom a representative type, the ordinary product of a privileged class, rather than an aberration.
The harder debate is whether the novel grants Tom any sympathy, and an honest reading says yes, briefly and deliberately. The sympathy is concentrated in Nick’s image of Tom drifting on forever, a little wistfully, in search of the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. For one sentence, Tom is not a monster but a man stranded in his own anti-climax, peaked at twenty-one and aware, somewhere beneath the arrogance, that the rest is decline. There is a real pathos there, the pathos of a person who got everything early and has nowhere left to go. The Plaza panic adds a second flicker, the genuine fear of a man who might lose his wife.
But the sympathy is a trap the reader should not fall all the way into, because Fitzgerald grants it precisely to make the final judgment heavier. If Tom were incapable of any inner life, his cruelty would be merely mechanical, the cruelty of a thing. By allowing a flash of wistfulness, the novel makes Tom a person who could, in principle, be more than he is, and then shows him choosing, again and again, not to be. The sympathy is the setup; the careless retreat is the punchline. We are given just enough of Tom’s interior to know that his flatness is not incapacity but refusal, and a refusal is more damning than an incapacity.
The Strongest Reading of Tom Buchanan
Put the pieces together and the strongest single reading emerges. Tom Buchanan is the novel’s argument that inherited power corrupts not by making men scheme but by freeing them from consequence, and that the absence of consequence produces a specific kind of person: flat, cruel, hypocritical, and untouchable, a man with no need to grow because nothing ever forces him to. He is the destination the dreamers are killing themselves to reach, and the novel’s bleakest joke is that the destination is him.
This reading explains the features of Tom that a simpler account leaves dangling. It explains why he has no arc, because consequence is the engine of change and Tom is insulated from it. It explains why his cruelty is casual rather than calculated, because a man who never pays for harm never learns to weigh it. It explains why his hypocrisy is invisible to him, because the rules that would make him a hypocrite are rules he has never had to obey. And it explains why Fitzgerald makes him dull and frightened of a library book, because the point is not that the inheritor is a grand evil but that he is a small, scared, comfortable man with the power to ruin lives and no reason to stop. The deeper the analysis goes, the worse Tom looks, and the more precisely he indicts the world that made him.
Set against Gatsby, the reading sharpens further. Gatsby is a criminal who built his fortune in the rackets, a liar about his past, a man whose dream curdles into obsession. He is, by any moral ledger, a deeply compromised figure. And yet the novel mourns Gatsby and condemns Tom, because Gatsby’s striving, however deluded, comes from longing, while Tom’s security comes from accident and produces only carelessness. The contrast is the heart of the book, examined in full where the two men are read as foils, and it tells us where Fitzgerald’s moral weight falls. The novel can forgive almost anything in a man who reaches. It forgives nothing in the man who has arrived and uses his arrival to crush the reachers.
Closing Verdict
Tom Buchanan rewards the close reader who resists the easy hatred. He is not a complex man, and the analysis that tries to make him one, hunting for a hidden tenderness or a redemptive turn, works against the novel’s design. The achievement of the character is that his simplicity is exact and intended. Fitzgerald built a man who never changes in order to show that the people at the top of the order have no reason to, and that their stasis, dressed up as stability, is in fact the social rot the whole novel is diagnosing. Tom is power that never has to grow, and the cost of that power is paid by everyone around him while he retreats, untroubled, into his money.
For a reader heading into an essay, the usable thesis is here: argue that Tom’s flatness is the novel’s most pointed critique, that the absence of an arc is itself the meaning, and that Fitzgerald’s refusal to punish Tom is the most honest thing the book does about how inherited power actually behaves. Then defend it with the four scenes, the dinner, the broken nose, the Plaza, and the retreat, and let the casual deftness of that violence and the smoothness of that retreat carry the argument. To extend the reading, follow Tom into the analysis of his power, race, and brutality for the ideology beneath the manners, into the study of his affair with Myrtle for the cruelty up close, and into the comparison with Gatsby for the contrast that gives both men their meaning. Tom is the fixed point the novel turns on, and understanding him is understanding what The Great Gatsby is finally angry about.
The durability of this reading is worth one final note. Decades of readers have wanted Tom to be more interesting than he is, to harbor a secret wound or a buried decency that would make his cruelty tragic rather than ordinary, and the novel patiently refuses every such offer. That refusal is what keeps the character honest and the analysis sharp. A Tom with a redemptive depth would let the reader believe that the people at the top are, underneath, just like everyone else, capable of being reached and reformed. Fitzgerald declines the consolation. He gives us instead a man whose surface is the whole of him, whose worst qualities are exactly the ones his world rewards, and whose untroubled survival is the price the rest of the cast pays. To read Tom well is to accept that the novel means its bleakest implication: that some forms of power are answerable to nothing, and that the men who hold them feel the least of all.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Who is Tom Buchanan as a character?
Tom Buchanan is Daisy’s husband and the novel’s antagonist, a wealthy member of the old-money East Egg set who embodies inherited privilege at its most secure and least examined. A former college football star, he is physically powerful, arrogant, and cruel, and he carries himself with the certainty of a man the world has always deferred to. He keeps a mistress, holds racist views he airs at dinner, and treats people as obstacles or possessions. What makes Tom more than a simple bully is his function: he is the fixed, unchanging point the novel’s dreamers crash against, the man who already holds everything Gatsby is killing himself to reach. Reading him well means seeing his flatness as a deliberate structural statement about people whom power has freed from any need to grow.
Q: Is Tom Buchanan a villain in The Great Gatsby?
Tom serves as the antagonist, but villain is a slightly wrong word, and noticing why is the key to reading him. A villain schemes toward harm because harm is the goal. Tom schemes only toward his own comfort, and the harm he causes is collateral, the casual exhaust of a man optimizing for himself. He breaks Myrtle’s nose as a reflex and sends Wilson toward Gatsby because it solves a problem, not out of calculated malice. This makes him worse, not better. A villain takes his cruelty seriously enough to choose it; Tom’s cruelty is beneath choosing. Fitzgerald wants an antagonist who is not an aberration but a type, the ordinary product of a privileged class, because the novel is indicting a social order, not a single monster.
Q: What does Tom Buchanan want in the novel?
Tom does not want to acquire anything, since he already has the wife, the money, the house, the mistress, and the standing. What he wants is to keep all of it without ever having to choose or change, and keeping turns out to be more aggressive than wanting. He wants Daisy as a possession and Myrtle as a diversion at the same time, and he wants the hierarchy that places him at the top to remain exactly where it is. His jealousy, his territorial reaction at the Plaza, and even his panic over a faddish race book are all the same instinct scaled up: the defense of a perimeter. Tom’s identity is entirely his position, so any challenge to that position, in his marriage or in the wider world, registers as an existential threat.
Q: Does Tom Buchanan change over the course of the novel?
No, and this is the most important single fact about him. Tom is the only major character with no arc. He begins arrogant, cruel, and secure, and he ends the same way, briefly rattled at the Plaza when Daisy wavers but never actually altered. Fitzgerald withholds any growth, remorse, or comeuppance on purpose. Change is what the world demands of people who are subject to it, and Tom is insulated from consequence by inherited power, so nothing forces him to become anyone new. The flat character is the honest character here. A novel that gave Tom a redemptive turn would be lying about how his kind of security works. His stasis, dressed up as stability, is exactly the social rot the book is diagnosing.
Q: How does Tom Buchanan embody old-money privilege?
Tom is old money made flesh. Where Gatsby’s wealth is a performance of parties and rumors that can be unbuilt overnight, Tom’s wealth is a settled fact, expressed in polo ponies and a colonial mansion and the bored confidence of a man who has never worried about money. He embodies the difference between having money and being money: Gatsby has it and is still dismissed as nobody, while Tom is recognized, deferred to, and protected by reflex. The privilege shows most in his carelessness. A man who has never faced a consequence never develops the inner brake that consequence installs in everyone else, so his cruelty comes easily and leaves no guilt. Tom is the security inherited wealth buys once it has been there long enough to feel like nature.
Q: Why does Tom Buchanan escape all consequence?
Tom escapes because the social order is built to protect him, and the novel refuses to pretend otherwise. He causes two deaths indirectly, steering Wilson toward Gatsby with a lie, yet he faces no legal, social, or even emotional penalty. When Nick meets him months later, Tom is unrepentant and even aggrieved, sure he behaved correctly, before retreating into the cushioned life that was always waiting. Fitzgerald makes the escape complete on purpose. To punish Tom would be to suggest that consequence reaches his kind of power, which would be a comforting lie. The careless retreat is the novel’s bleakest and most honest move: it shows that inherited security means never having to clean up your own mess, because there is always someone else to do it.
Q: How does Fitzgerald introduce Tom Buchanan in Chapter 1?
Fitzgerald introduces Tom almost entirely through his body and his nostalgia, trusting the surface because Tom has no hidden depth to contradict it. Nick describes a sturdy, straw-haired man of thirty with a hard mouth, a supercilious manner, and arrogant eyes that make him seem to lean aggressively forward. The frame is muscular and, in Nick’s word, cruel, as if cruelty were structural rather than chosen. Fitzgerald then fixes Tom in time: a former football star who peaked at twenty-one, one of those men for whom everything afterward feels like anti-climax. The setting completes the portrait. Tom stands on his East Egg porch having moved polo ponies across the country for amusement, the geography and the leisure marking him as inherited wealth before he finishes a sentence.
Q: What does Tom Buchanan’s football past reveal about him?
Tom’s football career is the key to his restlessness. Nick calls him one of the most powerful ends ever to play at New Haven, a national figure who reached an acute, limited excellence at twenty-one. The phrase limited is doing quiet work: Tom’s greatness had a ceiling and an expiry date, and he hit both early. Everything afterward, in Nick’s reading, savors of anti-climax, which is why Nick imagines Tom drifting forever in search of the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. The detail humanizes Tom for exactly one sentence, granting him the pathos of a man stranded in his own decline. It also explains the aimless aggression. With no field left to dominate, Tom dominates dinner tables, marriages, and mistresses instead, looking for a charge he will never feel again.
Q: Does Fitzgerald give Tom Buchanan any sympathy?
Briefly and deliberately, yes. The sympathy lives almost entirely in Nick’s image of Tom drifting wistfully after an irrecoverable football game, the portrait of a man who peaked early and senses the long decline ahead. The Plaza panic adds a second flicker, the real fear of a man who might lose his wife. But the sympathy is a setup, not a softening. By granting Tom a flash of interior life, Fitzgerald shows that Tom could, in principle, be more than he is, and then shows him refusing, again and again, to be. That makes the final careless retreat heavier, not lighter. A flat character with no inner life would be merely a mechanism; Tom’s flatness is a choice, and a refusal to grow is more damning than an incapacity to.
Q: Is Tom Buchanan a hypocrite?
Completely, and the most interesting thing about his hypocrisy is that he cannot see it. At the Plaza he is outraged that Gatsby has pursued his wife, even as he keeps a mistress in the city and has a history of affairs going back to a chambermaid. He condemns in Gatsby exactly the disloyalty he practices freely, and he does so without a trace of self-awareness, insisting that he always comes back and loves Daisy in his heart all the time. This is not hypocrisy he is hiding; it is hypocrisy he genuinely does not perceive, because the rules that would convict him are rules he has never had to obey. His double standard is invisible to him because his entire life has taught him that standards apply to other people. The obliviousness is the point.
Q: Does Tom Buchanan love Daisy?
In his own terms, yes, but his love is the love of an owner for a possession he cannot imagine losing. Tom is unfaithful throughout the marriage, yet he is genuinely shaken when Daisy’s loyalty wavers at the Plaza, and his reaction is heat rather than strategy, the response of a man whose property is being touched. He insists, in the same breath that he admits his affairs, that in his heart he loves Daisy all the time, and the line is both self-serving and, on Tom’s terms, sincere. He does love her, the way a man loves something he owns. The contradiction between the affairs and the devotion is not a lie he is telling; it is a contradiction he does not register, because losing Daisy would mean a limit on his appetite, and Tom does not believe in limits.
Q: Is Tom Buchanan intelligent?
It is a misreading to play Tom as a dumb jock, but his intelligence is narrow and defensive rather than broad or curious. He reads, however badly, half-digesting a faddish race book and parroting it at dinner. He is shrewd enough to hire a detective, to trace Gatsby’s fortune to the rackets, and to choose the right moment and setting to expose him. But his mind only sharpens when his position is threatened; the rest of the time it idles in nostalgia and grievance. Tom is clever the way a guard dog is clever, alert to intrusion and useless at anything else. His intelligence is entirely instrumental, a tool for defending the perimeter of his comfort, which is why it never produces insight, growth, or any thought that does not serve Tom.
Q: What is Tom and Daisy’s marriage like?
The marriage is a partnership of mutual carelessness held together by class and convenience more than affection. Tom is openly unfaithful, keeping Myrtle in the city and conducting his affairs with little discretion, and Daisy knows. Yet the marriage survives every strain, including Gatsby, because both partners are finally more committed to the security of their position than to any romantic alternative. At the Plaza, Daisy cannot quite say she never loved Tom, and that hesitation decides everything. After the deaths, the two of them sit together over cold chicken and ale, conspiring, already a unit again. Nick’s verdict captures the bond exactly: they were careless people who smashed things up and then retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness. The marriage endures because carelessness, shared, is its own kind of glue.
Q: What does Tom Buchanan represent in The Great Gatsby?
Tom represents old-money privilege at its most secure and least self-aware, and through him the novel delivers its harshest verdict on the American class system. He is the destination the dreamers strain toward, the man who already holds the wealth, the standing, and the belonging that Gatsby manufactures a counterfeit of. What he reveals is that the prize at the top is hollow, because the person already up there is cruel, dull, hypocritical, and frightened of a library book. Fitzgerald could have made the inheritor charming and kept the critique gentle. By making him careless and untouchable instead, the novel argues that inherited power corrupts not by making men scheme but by freeing them from consequence, and that the absence of consequence produces exactly the kind of small, comfortable, dangerous man Tom is.
Q: Which scene best reveals Tom Buchanan’s character?
The Plaza Hotel confrontation in Chapter 7 is the most complete revelation, because there Tom wins without violence. Cornered by the possibility of losing Daisy, he fights with his belonging rather than his fists, exposing Gatsby’s bootlegging, mocking his pink suit, and reducing him to nobody from nowhere, a line that lands only because Tom has the standing to make it stick. In the same scene he performs his own injured virtue, excusing his affairs as harmless sprees while condemning Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy. The hypocrisy is total and he does not feel it. The scene shows Tom’s true weapon is social certainty and his deepest blind spot is a double standard he cannot perceive, which together explain why he wins and why winning costs him nothing.
Q: What happens to Tom Buchanan at the end of The Great Gatsby?
After Myrtle’s death, Tom steers the grieving Wilson toward Gatsby with the suggestion that Gatsby was driving, then leaves Long Island with Daisy. The two of them simply withdraw, closing an apartment, packing up, and vanishing from the wreckage they helped cause. Months later Nick runs into Tom on Fifth Avenue and confronts him, only to find Tom unrepentant and even self-pitying, convinced he behaved correctly throughout. Nick refuses to shake his hand at first, then does, deciding that arguing with Tom is like arguing with a child. Tom ends the novel exactly as secure and untroubled as he began it, the deaths already shrinking behind him into an unpleasant memory, which is the bleakest confirmation that his kind of power is never made to answer for anything.
