I think not.
Nick comes to love Gatsby, the first person whom he has ever loved. (he betrays women one way or another, looks down on less fortunate folk a la his father's advice).
He learns that the rich, for whom he is the minor servant as a bond salesman, are nothing to write home about, or worse. He learns to give up his moral superiority which he brags about at the start.
He idolizes Gatsby, a crook and maybe murderer, and makes him a romantic hero who keeps his love despite his defeat at the hands of the rich and in the end he learns how morally bankrupt the whole social scene he has been in is. And heads back to a better mid-America, not before singing a hymn to the American promise expressed in the beauty.
A story of how devotion can make a possible mensch out of a self-satisfied putz and moral snob. Gatsby is not a realized character, but a creature of Nick's idolization, a product of his imagination, but /andcrucial as such to his transformation.
How Fitzgerald made this apparently slight story into a masterpiece that is routinely read as (bad) sociology, the American dream and all that, is amazing.
P: (as adapted and added to by me)
Thanks for your smart and telling thoughts.
But I see the book differently.
Paradoxical greatness I think there is.
Nick's apparently naive judgment of Gatsby is at once an ironic ploy by FitzGerald to ridicule the twenties’ sweep into lavish prosperity leading to 1929. The title in this sense is mock-heroic with a moral judgment.
Gatsby's economic and social rise is finally brought down by his quest to overcome aristocratic distance and class barriers since high society turns out to be worse than toxic. So, the novel has a dimension of social realism, evident in the irony of “great.”
Gatsby's relentless and ruthless pursuit of his ideal, Daisy who sounds like money, is fantastical in the scale of his ambition. His pursuit takes in his predatory first encounter with her at the pre-war party, his bootlegging hobbnobbing with the Jew, Arnold Rothstein, aka “Mr. Big,” aka “The Brain,” aka “AR,” aka here Wolfsheim, the lavish excesses of his parties and, too, his aloofness from the constructed excesses of his Long Island life.
Yet at the same time he is ennobled, “Great,” that is to say, by his quixotic quest for his own Dulcinea. It marks him to this extent in stark contrast to the wantonly destructive Buchanans and their ilk who smash things heedlessly and them move on, leaving their wreckage behind. He’s better, Nick says, than the “whole rotten bunch of them.”
Gatsby is great in his quest in a kind naive innocence that’s about him, a lack of intent to harm, an unintentional carelessness, opposite to Tom Buchanan's knowing and assaultive recklessness.
Gatsby lives to fulfill a vision, however flawed that the Buchanans, bobbing on old money earned by an earlier generation, and those who profit effortlessly from the valleys of ashes, can’t begin to imagine.
The green light idea ennobles Gatsby as a naïf, a fool and a visionary. All of that is in “Great.” But there’s no ennobling light for Tom, only dark, harsh condemnation.
Gatsby's character, which ordains his fate, is a salutary lesson about unbridled egotism for Nick through whose wisening eyes we see the story unfold. Through Gatsby Nick overcomes his father's advice not to judge.
There’s this:
“Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
And this:
... ...And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us...
Testament to the paradoxes of his greatness.
In sum, I’ve always thought that the novel does see a paradoxical greatness in Gatsby as he quixotically pursues realizing his dream of Daisy even as her meretricious emptiness is patent, that there’s a kind of romantic greatness in his commitment to his illusion of an ideal, just as, though Fitzgerald is more caustic about it, Don Quixote tilts at windmills and in his illusive romantic haze transforms his Dulcinea into a great beauty worthy of his absurd knightly chivalry.
Otherwise, all that’s left is a world of Sancho Panzas or a world of hangers on at Gatsby’s parties.
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