In this essay I will try to argue that even though Jay Gatsby is a very wealthy man, he is, since he

falls short in most of the aspects that determines a persons social status, not an equal to the likes of
Daisy and Tom in the eyes of the old upper class society. Therefore, Gatsby never stands a chance of
succeeding with his attempt to win back Daisy, who is a part of that society and of a different status.
Theory In this essay I will, by using a Marxist approach, analyze how the events in the novel The
Great Gatsby reflect the changing society and the norms and values in America during the 1920s.
The novel includes characters from several different socioeconomic classes and this essay aims to
study the relationship between these social classes. I will examine the presence of social class in the
novel and the effect it has on the relationships between the different characters. In Critical Theory
Today (2006), Lois Tyson explains the differences in socioeconomic class by dividing people into the
haves and the have-nots:
From a Marxist perspective, differences in socioeconomic class divide people in ways that are much more
significant than differences in religion, race, ethnicity, or gender. For the real battle lines are drawn, to put
the matter simply, between 6
Nick Carraway

Finally I shall look at the narrator Nick Carraway and his relation to Gatsby and his dream, as well as
the other characters. His narrative will be examined with focus on his view of Gatsby. Since Nick is
both the narrator and a character his narration will be reviewed and questioned.

Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby as well as one of the main characters. Nick being
the narrator means that the reader automatically will see Nicks view of things even if he has
misinterpreted things, exaggerated or if he is a victim of wishful thinking. Therefore it is important
to be critical and question his conclusions and depictions of things.

Nick is a man in his late twenties when the story begins. He comes from a quite wealthy family in
the Mid-West and he is the second cousin once removed of Daisy Buchanan. Coming home after

Scrimgeour claims that Nick is not at all as honest or high-principled as he wants to seem, based on
his not treating Jordan in a nice way and that she accuses him of being careless. The very same
word is used by Nick to describe the Buchanans (Scrimgeour 75). It is also worth pointing out that
Nick does not do anything to prevent any of the unpleasant events in the novel. Perhaps Nick had a
greater part in the unfortunate events than he wants to admit and that he out of guilt took charge
of arranging Gatsbys funeral. If that is the case the whole novel can be seen as Nicks way to plead
not guilty and erase any part he may have had in Gatsbys death.

Scrimgeour compares Nicks narration to that of Marlowe in Heart of Darkness who like Nick is the
narrator at the same time as he is a character. The difference between Marlows and Carraway's
words is the difference between a man who cannot deny reality and a man who cannot face it (77).
Nick does not want to face reality but for what reason is the subject of speculations. One thing that
is for sure is that Gatsby is not as great as the title of the novel wants to suggest.
Conclusion

Throughout the novel Gatsby has a dream that he is trying to make come true. This dream is to
become an equal of the Buchanans and their peers who belong to a higher social class. He began his
aspiration towards a higher social class before he met Daisy but she came to symbolize his goal and
by winning her he would have reached that goal.

Apart from Daisy, the colour green is an important symbol for Gatsbys dream and represents
money and hope. Gatsbys dream began before he met Daisy and started off being much like the
American dream. However, when he met Daisy his dream transformed and became something
more. After getting a glimpse into Daisy glamorous life his dream moved towards the aspiration to
become a member of the upper class, and to have a big fortune. The

latter could still be interpreted as the American dream. When he has succeeded with this he
expects life to be carefree and perfect. Daisy is the main symbol of the dream and by winning her
he will fulfil the dream. Gatsby has lied about a lot of things such as his family, education, being a
bootlegger and those lies caught up with him in end. What Gatsby has not realized is that he cannot
win Daisy and he cannot be accepted as an equal by those above him on the class ladder.

The reason his dream fails is that he is exposed as a liar and a bootlegger making Daisy turn her
back on him. Although Gatsby did not realize it Daisy would probably never have left her husband
for him anyway. She is too class-conscious and she is no longer the young girl he once knew. She is
changed and she is a mother. Gatsby has not realized either that his money is not good enough to
those of the upper class since it is not old money. They feel threatened by self-made men as him
and do their best to keep him out. Hence his dream was bound to fail from the very beginning.

The accuracy of Nicks narration of the novel can also be questioned. There is a possibility that he
romanticises Gatsby and that Nick has a greater part in the novels unfortunate events that he
wants to admit. It is possible that he was not as honest as he claimed he was and there are clues
that he may not have been as high-principled as he wanted to seem. The great Gatsby was probably
not so great after all.

What happens in East and West Egg in The Great Gatsbv shows Fitzgerald's increasing
fascination with the paradises American's wealthiest people attempt to build outside of the city.
Yet in the same paragraph he also mentions feeling "a haunting loneliness sometimes" (Gatsbv.

The Great Gatsbv in his essay titled "Boats Against the Current": "In one sense, the moral
conflict in the novel is resolved into a conflict between East and West the ancient and corrupt
East and the raw but virtuous West."1 The only character judging the East and West in these
terms, however, is Nick Carraway, the narrator who introduces himself as someone "inclined to
reserve all judgments" (Gatsbv. 1).
The narration itself then represents the maturation of Nick from a "primitive" to a "civilized"
mind, capable of distinguishing self from the world and of analyzing both self and world.
Writing for Carraway is in effect a tour de force of consciousness. As Jung stated: "For it is the
function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the
gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world
within us."6 From this point, it is appropriate to concentrate on that primary sense so critical to
Nick, his vision. His ability to see, outwardly at first, inwardly later, makes his narration
possible and thus the device of the firstperson narrator provides an incredibly complex
dimension to Fitzgerald's novel. It is not my objective to psychoanalyze Carraway per se. But it
is wrong to focus exclusively on Gatsby as the representative American psyche of the novel;
Carraway may be writing a book about his experience with a "great" man, but the most complex
character of the novel is this average American, Carraway
himself.
.
corruption in both. In an inscription of a copy of The Great Gatsbv sent to a friend, Fitzgerald
himself wrote: "This is really not a moral book. I swear before God that if it seems to be I'm
going to a psychoanalist [sic]" (Correspondence. 157).
To venture to New York and try his hand in the bond business is an extremely bold move for a
member of this clan.
.
Simultaneously, But the integral
symbols of artistry in both East and West Egg are the mansions, lawns and gardens. Gatsby's
estate is described
as:
. . . a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking
new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of
lawn and garden. (Gatsbv. 5)

Critic Kenneth Reed has presented another interpretation of the Eggs. In his article "East Egg.
West Egg. All Around the Tower: The Geography of Fitzgerald's Gatsbv.11 he viewed the tower
of Gatsby's mansion with its ivy beard as a phallic symbol, and saw the land formations
as "two testiculate eggs."12 But in my opinion, to interpret the two Eggs as America's two eyes
is consistent with Fitzgerald's most obvious symbols of vision reappearing throughout the novel.
Thus, Nick attempts to see America with both eyes. He is a Westerner come East, hoping to
adopt a new, broader point of view.

At the moment when Daisy and Gatsby are united within Nick's bungalow a union of East Egg
and West Egg, man and woman, dream and reality, past and present the narrator
perceives the same kind of "violet hour":
Whereas Gatsby has only a singular focus, an intense dream vision based on an illusion, Nick's
vision is broad., Nick sees things as they are. Nick actually claims to see "within and without."

But in seeing clearly, in seeing from the multifaceted Eastern and Western points of view, he
also sees disillusionment, cruelty, dishonesty and death. This vision is, ironically, even more
horrible that the violent scenes he must have witnessed during the war. And thus, he explains his
return
home in terms of a limited, safer perspective: "life is
much more successfully looked at from a single window,
after all" (Gatsbv. 4). This is an image of a monocle, in contrast to the spectacles represented by
the Eggs. Not surprisingly, then, Nick describes his own moments of double vision, of
perspicacity, as moments of pain. For example, Gatsby's parties are ruined for him when he
begins to see them from Daisy's perspective:
. . . I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't been there before. Or
perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself,
with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it
had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is
invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your
own powers of adjustment. (Gatsbv.
105)
By the novel's concluding pages, Nick completely rationalizes his inability to survive in the East
as a vision problem. He states, "Even when the East excited me most. . . even then it had always
for me a quality of distortion" (Gatsbv. 177). And just one paragraph later,
he reasserts his point: "After Gatsby's death the East was
haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power
of correction" (Gatsbv. 178).
He has seen Gatsby as a generous man and a foolish dreamer, Tom and Daisy as the affluent
uppercrust and careless, selfish people, Jordan as a fascinating, competitive woman and a liar,
the Wilsons as middle-class schemers and tragic pawns. He has seen the facade of the civilized
East, and the actual, animalistic actions of the human beings who reside there. His East-
West vision is one of a unified horror.
.
.
The first pages of the novel acquaint the reader with Nick's background and his Midwestern
family, with the location of his bungalow, with Gatsby's mansion, with the Buchanan
estate, and with the origins of Tom Buchanan in Chicago.
The Great Gatsbv begins with an epigraph, a stanza of poetry. The lines are about impressing a
woman, foreshadowing the efforts of Gatsby. But the interesting point is that the poem is by Tom
d'Invilliers another fictional writer created by Fitzgerald, the Princeton poet of This Side of
Paradise.
James Mellard has asserted, in "Counterpoint as Technique in The Great Gatsbv. 111 that the
novel's main character is Nick and that the work is actually an initiation story. In "The Theme
and Narrator of The Great Gatsbv." Thomas Hanzo labeled the genre in a different fashion, but
makes a similar point: "The Great Gatsbv is not a melodrama about Jay Gatsby, but a definition
of the senses in which Nick understands the word 'great.'"20 In "Against The Great Gatsbv."
Gary Scrimgeour saw the narrator as the flaw of the novel. Scrimgeour criticized Carraway as a
participant in the novel because he "is neither as honest nor as high-principled as he might like
to seem" and because he is present at so many evil occasions where "his main principle is to say
nothing."21
. At the first dinner at the East Egg house, Buchanan discusses "The Rise of the Colored
Empires" by Goddard: '"It's all scientific stuff....It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch
out or these other races will have control of things" ( Gatsbv. 13). Later in the summer, at
Gatsby's party,Buchanan talks about a 1920 theory, similar to current
mixed ideas about today's "greenhouse effect":
"I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year," said Tom genially.
"It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun or wait a minute it's just the
opposite the sun's getting colder every year." ( Gatsbv. 118)
During the process of composing the novel, Fitzgerald at one point felt that Tom Buchanan was
the most important character in the book. In a letter to Max Perkins, Fitzgerald compared
Buchanan to some of the most successful male characters of contemporary realism: "I suppose
he's the best character I've ever done I think he and the brother in Salt and Hurstwood in Sister
Carrie are the three best characters in American fiction in the last twenty years..." (Letters. 173).
Gatsby, in contrast to Buchanan, pays no heed to science. His sees the world as a design of his
own dreams. In terms of his own identity, he erases the facts of his past and transforms himself
from Jimmy Gatz to Jay Gatsby. He clings to his vision of Daisy as the golden girl, even after he
has had ample opportunity to see her shallowness.
.
Nick, the realist, understands the role of the imagination in Gatsby's vision of life and the
function of theory, an attempt to justify superiority, in Buchanan's outlook. More than anything,
the houses of the three become the symbols of their perspectives. Buchanan's mansion on East
Egg has the quiet elegance that is considered socially acceptable by the upper class. But
life within its walls is stifling. Gatsby's palace is lit up like the world's fair because it is a
showplace of his dream, intended to attract Daisy's attention. Life looks like fun there, but fails
to connect with the deeper dimensions of human relationships. And Nick's bungalow is nothing
special to look at essentially just a roof over his head, a house reduced to its most functional
use, a shelter. Life within is mere existence, without emotional intensity. Nick never even calls
his servant by a name? she is just "the Finn." All three men choose to come East and reside in
these particular houses. All three attempt
to escape their Western pasts in doing so? Gatsby has left
his boyhood identity back in the rural West, Buchanan has
run away from a scandal in Chicago, Carraway has left a
failed romance in St. Paul. But it is only the realist, Carraway, who realizes that one can never,
ultimately, escape the past or forget one's origins. At the same time, he recognizes that Gatsby's
hope is unfounded. While you cannot escape the past, you also cannot recreate it or relive it.
Personality is a continuum? Carraway realizes that
identity must begin in the place of birth. The critic
Carrithers, in emphasizing the importance of the meaning of
home in The Great Gatsbv. has pointed this out:
Whether in St. Paul, Chicago, New Haven,
Dan Cody's yacht, New York City, or Louisville, home is the Eden-like place where each of
these people experienced what everyone experiences: the first
major discovery of self and the first major failure or loss of self.
Nick presents a final, but vivid image of the eyes of the Eggs looking into the heavens. Gatsby is
murdered while floating on a raft in his pool. Lying on the raft, he resembles the pupil of the eye
floating in the blue iris of West Egg, colored by the water of his pool. Nick imagines Gatsby's
last view before death, one where his dream vision was forced to clash with nature's realism:
He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found
what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A
new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted
fortuitously (Gatsbv. 162) about....
includes this record of his dream, which is essentially
.

The Great Gatsbv with your charming and overpowering inscription arrived the very morning
that I was leaving in some haste for a sea voyage advised by my doctor. I therefore left it behind
and only read it on my return a few days ago. I have, however, now read it three times. I am not
in the least influenced by your remark about myself when I say that it has interested and excited
me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years.
When I have time I should like to write to you more fully and tell you exactly why it seems to
me such a remarkable book. In fact it seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has
taken (Crack U since Henry James.... p . 310)

The Great Gatsbv. more than any work by Eliot, examines that modern experience in an
American context. Appropriately, the American dreamer dies within its pages. But the persona of
Nick Carraway, the man who sees with two eyes, the man who recognizes the dichotomies of
experience, the average man who seeks order and wrings his hands in frustration at disorder, the
realistic man who makes mistakes and occasionally contradicts himself, the honest man who tells
his story by starting at the end rather than the beginning, this American persona lives. Like
Prufrock, Carraway sings. including the "poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows
waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner . . . wasting the most poignant moments
of night and life (Gatsbv. 57).