The document provides analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby. It summarizes Gatsby's background and rise to wealth through illegal means with Meyer Wolfsheim. His sole motivation was his love for Daisy and desire to marry her, though she was already married. When they reunite years later, Daisy cannot fully commit to Gatsby's dream of repeating the past. The dream of recapturing their love is shattered by the disparity between Gatsby's illusion and reality.

1. University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius - Skopje
Faculty of Philology - Department of English Language and Literature
A research paper on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
Course title: American Literature
Date:

2. Why Gatsby is Great, and Why Gatsby is a Failure
We all aspire to be successful in life. However, success is something different people
understand differently. For some people success means the possession of money which
provides a luxurious and easy life. For some people money is not so important. Some
writers, for example, measure their success by the popularity of their books and even
though the popularity itself brings money, it is not the money that counts for them, but
the self-satisfaction that their works or creations (if they happen to be successful) bring.
Most serious writers of F.S. Fitzgerald’s age avoided involvements in the
commercial culture because they thought it was hostile to art. Fitzgerald, on the other
hand, always remained close to the business world which the others were trying to evade.
He wrote for magazines because it yielded him a large income that he could not have
earned in any other way, and the income was necessary to his self-respect. He liked to
spend money without counting in order to enjoy a sense of careless potency. What was
the reason for this attitude toward money? Maybe it was result of the new spirit of his
age when the young businessmen were bitterly determined to be successful and they had
been taught to measure success, failure, and even virtue in monetary terms. But money
was not the only thing they dreamed of earning. Their real dream was that of achieving a
new status and a new essence, of rising to a loftier place in the mysterious hierarchy of
human worth.
Fitzgerald himself, like many of his heroes in his short stories and like Gatsby, could
not marry his everlasting love, the girl from his youth Ginevra King, because she
originated from an established wealthy family and “poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying
rich girls”.1
The wound over Ginevra never healed. Certainly, this sad experience of his
inspired him to write about poor or middle-class young men with aspirations to earn a
fortune, acquire a position at the peak of the social hierarchy and marry the girl they
want (preferably a rich one). Thus the rich girl becomes the symbol of that position, the
incarnation of its mysterious power. “That is Daisy Buchanan’s charm for Jay Gatsby [in
the novel The Great Gatsby], and it is the reason why he directs his whole life toward
winning back her love” 2
, or is it not?
1
Fitzgerald’s Ledger, p.70
2
Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction: The Romance of Money.” Three Novels of F.Scott Fitzgerald (New
York,1953).

3. Let me elaborate the story of Gatsby’s life as we understand it through the narrator,
Nick Carraway. Gatsby came from a very poor family. His parents were “shiftless and
unsuccessful farm people” and “his imagination had never really accepted them as his
parents at all” 3
. At the age of seventeen, an instinct toward his future glory had led him
to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two
weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself,
and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. He drifted
back to Lake Superior and he was still searching for something to do on the day that the
yacht of the millionaire Dan Cody dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore. That yacht
represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. Cody employed him after he found
out that he was a quick and extravagantly ambitious young man. For five years, while he
remained with Cody, he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor.
Maybe the arrangement would have lasted indefinitely if Dan Cody had not died one
night in Boston. He inherited money from Cody - a legacy of twenty-five thousand
dollars, but he never got it. He was left with his singularly appropriate education; the
vague contour of Jay Gatsby as it was when he first got aboard Cody’s yacht now had
filled out to the substantiality of a man.
There is no information about Gatsby’s life between 1912 and 1917 when he first
met Daisy Fay. We can only assume that he went on working whatever job he could find
that brought him food and bed. We find out that in 1917 he was still a penniless young
man and an officer from Camp Taylor, a man without a past, a nobody from nowhere.
However, that did not prevent him from visiting Daisy’s house, at first with other officers
from Camp Taylor, then alone. As he had once admired the beautiful (presumably white)
Cody’s yacht, now he admired Daisy’s beautiful white palace:
It amazed him-he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an
air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there-it was as casual a thing to her as his
tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms
upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking
place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in
lavender, but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor-cars and of
dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. (p. 148)
3
F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), p. 99. Subsequent
references are indicated parenthetically in the text.

4. Daisy Fay was just eighteen and by far the most popular of all the young girls in
Louisville. It excited Gatsby, too, that many men had already loved her - it increased her
value in his eyes.
She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone
rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of
monopolizing her that night. (p. 75)
The white colour mentioned so often in connection to Daisy symbolizes her innocence,
purity, youth, freshness and naivety. On the other hand, the white colour includes an
element of magic, of the transformation of a mundane world into fairy tale. It is Gatsby’s
fairy tale, and Daisy is “high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl” (p.
120). The king’s white palace is the realm of impossible, absolute fulfilment, where the
swine-herd turns into a prince and lives happily ever after. It is an image of Gatsby’s day-
dream, the wish-begotten fantasy, by which he creates for himself pictures of an escape
from the dreariness of daily reality. However, Gatsby knows that “at any moment the
invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders” (p.149). If that happened
Daisy would find out that he was poor.
So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and
unscrupulously - eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had
no real right to touch her hand.
...he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a
person from much the same stratum as herself - that he was fully able to take care of her.
(p. 149)
Gatsby had intended, probably, to take what he could and go, but soon he was very
surprised to find out that he loved her and Daisy was in love with him too. Their love
affair ended one afternoon because Gatsby was to be sent abroad the next day. During
the war they wrote to each other. After the Armistice by some misunderstanding he was
not sent home but to Oxford instead. Daisy could not see why he could not come.
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his
presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life
shaped now, immediately - and the decision must be made by some force - of love, of
money, of unquestionable practicality - that was close at hand. (p. 151)

5. At that crucial moment Daisy desperately needed Gatsby, but he could not be there for
her. Even if he had been there for her, would he have been able to satisfy her need for
security? I doubt that. I think that Gatsby also was aware that Daisy was only “safe and
proud above the hot struggles of the poor”(p. 150) and that she would never be safe and
proud being with him because he was poor. When he came back from Europe he made a
miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville on the last of his army pay. He stayed
there a week, revisiting all the places where he and Daisy had been. The sweet dream
was over, Daisy was married and he happened not to be the prince she was married to.
He had only the nostalgic memories of the magic time he spent with her and the cruel
reality that he was penniless again. Going away from the city, “he streched out his hand
desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had
made lovely for him” (p. 153).
At this time another dream was born in him: getting her back in his life, more of a
quest for the grail than an actual dream. If his first boyish dream was to transcend the
social class to which his family belonged, this newly-born dream had far more elevated
essence - real love toward Daisy. Gatsby thought that he knew how to make her again a
part of his present. It is a pitiful fact that he had to fulfil the first dream in which he
failed up till then, that is to say, he had to make his fortune to keep up with Daisy’s
needs. I consider it a pitiful fact because Gatsby did not possess moral consciousness,
that is, the ability for making a distinction between good and bad (and between the legal
and illegal) ways of gaining wealth. Because of the dishonest means he used in achieving
his ultimate goal, he is impossible to admire. But still he cannot be completely
condemned for his machiavellian attitude. His means were corrupt indeed, but his dream,
in general, was not corrupt. Is it not love the ultimate goal most people are seeking in
life?
Let me now return to the main flow of events that shaped Gatsby’s life. After leaving
Louisville, he somehow managed to get to New York where Meyer Wolfsheim turned up
as his “destiny”. Wolfsheim was a famous gambler, a bootlegger, the man who fixed the
World’s Series in 1919, and who knows what else. When he first met him, Gatsby had
not eaten anything for a couple of days and he was still wearing his uniform because
he could not buy some regular clothes.

6. Soon afterwards, Wolfsheim started him in his business. In his words, this is what
happened:
“I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine-
appearing , gentlemanly young man, and when he told me he was an Oggsford I knew I
could use him good. I got him to join up in the American Legion and he used to stand high
there. Right off he did some work for a client up to Albany. We were so thick like that in
everything” - he held up two bulbous fingers - “always together.” (p. 172)
At this point, I can see what the reason might have been for Gatsby to become immoral.
It seems that he had no choice. He did not have the opportunity to choose between a
decent job and the one that Wolfsheim offered him. He was hungry and with no home
where he could go back at night. Wolfsheim was the first one in the big strange city to
offer him food and bed and Gatsby must have seen his benefactor in him from the very
start. But he was wrong. Wolfsheim’s intentions were not inspired by his ‘benevolence’
but by his selfishness. He knew he could use him good. So Gatsby was Wolfsheim’s
victim, a little fly caught in the big spider’s web, or I should better say ‘a little prey in the
big predator’s lair’. There is no doubt that Gatsby felt such gratitude toward Wolfsheim
as once he felt toward Dan Cody and that was why he became an obedient and servile
tool in his hands. On the other hand, I cannot claim that Gatsby was so naive as not to be
aware that with his qualifications he was bound to fail. Gatsby probably knew that no
other job could bring him such income as his ‘connections’ with Wolfsheim could do. So
if he wanted to climb very high, and he did, then he had to play according to
Wolfsheim’s rules. And he did that.
When Gatsby managed to fulfil the first dream, when he climbed almost the highest
scale in the social hierarchy, he could start fulfilling the second dream - the pursuit of
Daisy. He found out that she had moved from Chicago to New York and bought a house
in East Egg, and that is why he bought his mansion in West Egg, just across the bay. He
threw big and fancy parties every Saturday night, hoping that Daisy would appear at one
of them, but she never came. He was so close to her and yet so far away. There was a
single green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and it had often lured him at night and
encouraged him to go on dreaming.
The dream was near to materialization when Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s neighbour and
Daisy’s second cousin once removed, arranged for Gatsby to meet her one rainy
afternoon. Gatsby did not have to ‘strech out his arms toward the dark water’ anymore.
Daisy was there, in the same room with him, the embodiment of his dream come true.

7. We are not given a detailed information about the relationship between them since that
moment. From a conversation between Gatsby and Nick, we are given only a hint that
they must have become lovers:
“I hear you fired all your servants.”
“I wanted somebody who wouldn’t gossip. Daisy comes over quite often - in the
afternoons.” (p. 114)
Gatsby’s dream was not to have Daisy as a lover but to have her as his wife. He wanted
her to divorce her husband and “after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville
and be married from her house - just as if it were five years ago” (p. 111). He strongly
believed that he could wipe out, at a stroke, the four years of her married life. What
Gatsby demanded of her was that she should go to Tom and say, in all sincerity, “I never
loved you.”
“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now - isn’t that enough? I can’t
help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once - but I loved you too.”
Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.
“You loved me too?” he repeated. ( p. 133)
This is the unadmirable impossibility upon which his faith is staked. The ultimate
romantic affirmation, “I’ll always love you alone” cannot be brought to life. His faith
removes some sizeable molehills on his way but is absolutely powerless when it comes to
mountains, and the real Daisy is that mountain. Gatsby’s faith has to break, in the end,
against the reality radically incompatible with it.4
Gatsby’s main fault is that his faith is
so overwhelming and of such enormous intensity that it allows him to contemplate
boundless possibilities. It removes the most elementary common sense. In his own
private world, past and future are held captive in the present.5
We can see that from the
dialogue between him and Nick:
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why, of course you can!” (p.111)
4
A. E. Dyson, “The Great Gatsby: Thirty-Six Years After.” Mizener 1963: 119
5
Ibid., 121.

8. Gatsby does not succeed in repeating the past no matter how much he has tried and
believed in it.
Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the
colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown
himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every
bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a
man will store up in his ghostly heart. (p. 97)
The last battle is lost for Gatsby - the battle between illusion and reality. He is not “a son
of God” after all. Daisy returns to her husband Tom, and Gatsby goes on watching over
her to the end, but half aware himself of the fact that he is watching over nothing: “So I
walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing” (p.
146).
The reality turns out to be less admirable, less human than the fantasy. In the end
Gatsby is killed by Wilson, the husband of Tom’s mistress. Before that Daisy runs over
Wilson’s wife, driving Gatsby’s car. Tom, who knows that Daisy was behind the wheel,
directs the demented Wilson to Gatsby’s house. The most ironical thing here is that
Wilson himself was under misapprehension about the true lover of his wife. He thought
that Gatsby was Myrtle’s lover and the one who killed her. The novel ends in triple
death: Myrtle’s, Gatsby’s and Wilson’s. Tom and Daisy, the ones most responsible for
their deaths, leave New York the next day and go on with their meaningless and empty
lives as if nothing has happened.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and
then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept
them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made... (pp.180-181)
I suppose Gatsby was doomed to die because of his loyalty to Daisy and his blind
faith. My standpoint is that his dream was too big (but only for him) because he was a
common man. He dared to enter the artificial world of the high-class people like Tom
and Daisy, and he was lost there. He ran away from the chaos of the lower orders but
only to find a bigger chaos and confusion among the rich. There was emptiness where he
climbed. Those people had no dreams. They did things for no particular reason.
They had spent a year in France with no particular reason, and then drifted here and
there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. (p. 6)

9. I have stated that Gatsby is a “common man” for an obvious reason - he was poor. On
the other hand, I can see why he is great; the reason is simple - he had a dream, a
dream whose worth he himself did not understand fully. And his dream was worthy
indeed. Maybe the object of his dream (and that was Daisy) makes his dream seem
grotesque or absurd because she was not so worthy a person, but it is the feelings, the
strong emotions of love he was capable of experiencing that we should consider when
we judge him. If he was capable of loving somebody so intensely and was ready even to
sacrifice himself in order to protect the person he loved, then can we condemn and scorn
him without feeling a bit of a guilty conscience for that attitude? After all, this world we
are living in is so imperfect. There are so many people being merely after money, trying
in every way to become rich or famous and not caring whether the way they choose to
gain material things will make them sinful. The tendency to prefer material possessions
and physical comfort to spiritual values is so stressed in today’s modern materialistic
society that there is little place left for idealism like Gatsby’s. It has been proved for so
many times nowadays that people who follow after their ideal picture of things are
doomed to fail.
I am going to elaborate better the greatness I see in Gatsby, for I feel that is
necessary. In the beginning we could see his fascination with the rich people and his
ambition to become rich. We know how much he admired Cody’s yacht and Daisy’s
house. Daisy was valuable to him first as if she were some precious stone (a material
thing) and her value came from the things she possessed herself (or her family). Gatsby
then called the rich people “nice” and she was the first “nice” girl he had ever known.
In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people, but always
with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. (p. 148)
Most probably he found her excitingly desirable because of her money and the respect he
had for the rich. But gradually he started falling in love with her and he forget his
ambitions for the time being.
“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even
hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with
me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her... Well, there I
was, ’way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I
didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her
what I was going to do?” (p.150)

10. So gaining fortune, which was Gatsby’s primary ambition and dream since he was a
young boy, has now transformed into a means to fulfil his second dream and that is, as I
have already stated in this essay, pursuing Daisy’s love. Gatsby transcends the
philosophy of many people who strive to gain fortune for the fortune itself. His
prime and base motive melts into the lofty ideal simply called love in the same way as
night melts into dawn. The biggest irony is that the embodiment or, in other words, the
object of his ideal, that is, Daisy, is actually not ideal, not worthy of him or his dream.
Gatsby paid a high price for living too long with this dream. It was an illusion that
ultimately led to his downfall. His love, being as blind as his faith, cost him his life.
Moreover, nobody can conquer the passage of time, a very important fact that Gatsby
has obviously overlooked. “The poor son-of-a-bitch” (p.176) were the words said at his
funeral by one of the several men who attended it. He may have been a ‘poor son-of-a-
bitch’, but he was also ‘worth the whole damn bunch’ of Daisies, Toms, Jordans and
Sloanes put together. I am sorry that he could not see it.

11. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cowley, M. “Introduction: The Romance of Money.” Three Novels of F.Scott
Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.
Donaldson, S. ed. Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall & Co., 1984.
Dyson, A.E. “The Great Gatsby: Thirty-Six Years After.” Mizener 1963: 112-124.
Fitzgerald, F.S. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.
Lehan, R.D. ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction. Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966.
Lockridge, E. ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Great Gatsby: A Collection
of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.
Mizener, A. ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963.