The Fundamental Indecencies of The Great Gatsby

Shortly after The Great Gatsby was published in April 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented in a letter to his friend Edmund Wilson that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about." One hundred years later—as we celebrate the novel's centennial—many believe it is our country's greatest literary achievement, yet the critical debate on what the book actually means rages on.

On a recent podcast of The Daily, "100 Years of The Great Gatsby" (2025), A.O. Scott of The New York Times Book Review said that Fitzgerald's novel has an "elusiveness" that leaves readers "chasing after its meaning and [. . .] never quite catching up to it." Nevertheless, he claimed that there is no other book in the American canon that better helps us "explain to ourselves who we are." Maureen Corrigan—NPR book critic and author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (2014)—agrees, stating that Fitzgerald's novel "nails who we want to be as Americans. Not who we are; who we want to be. It's that wanting that runs through every page of Gatsby, making it our Greatest American Novel."

For critics like Corrigan, the story of Jay Gatsby is one of American aspiration, the belief that we can make anything of our lives—regardless of our background or circumstances—so long as we have the proper drive and determination. It is not the green light that is symbolic, she argues, but "Gatsby's reaching for it that's the crucial all-American symbol of the novel." In his introduction to the 1945 edition, Lionel Trilling concurred, claiming that Gatsby "comes to stand inevitably for America itself. Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, 'the American dream.'" It is Fitzgerald's "tenderness towards human desire," Trilling notes, that gives Gatsby's pursuit "an insane greatness, convincing us that he really is a Platonic conception of himself, really some sort of Son of God."

Other critics, however, disagree with this assessment. In "American Dreaming: Really Reading The Great Gatsby" (2020), William Cain believes Fitzgerald undermines the promise of the American Dream by revealing it is "largely myth, ideology, propaganda" because of persistent, intractable economic inequalities within American society:

Reading The Great Gatsby is intended, it appears, as an indoctrination in reverse:

we require young people to study Fitzgerald’s novel in high school and college

courses so they realize, before embarking on their careers, that the American Dream

they have heard about and will hear about, is beyond their reach. Even if they fulfill

their dreams and gain their desires in material terms, they will not be happy.

For some, the novel is not about economic limitations but racist power structures that are personified in the character of Tom Buchanan, who is convinced that "[c]ivilization's going to pieces" and that "if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged." In Rosa Inocencio Smith's "How The Great Gatsby Explains Trump" (2018), Fitzgerald's 1920s America reflects our current political climate with its hostility towards immigrants and its attempt to dismantle any challenges to the existing power structure through movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.

Smith claims that those who have power in American society "wield its blunt force as both a weapon and a shield. Such power has its own logic; it responds not to social or moral rules, but to what it perceives as danger. It’s for these reasons that [. . .] The Great Gatsby reads like a warning. For as much as it is a story about the American dream, it is also a story about power under threat, and of how that power, lashing out, can render truth irrelevant." Smith sees the rise of Donald Trump and white nationalism as having "exposed the gaps in America’s ideal of itself—the ugly currents of its power, the limits of its possibilities."

While these grand American themes that focus on Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy—and Tom's determination to stop him—are certainly prevalent in the novel, they are secondary concerns, primarily because they focus on what E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel (1927) would call "flat" characters, meaning those who are "constructed round a single idea or quality." Trilling agreed with this assessment, calling Fitzgerald's characters "ideographs" that serve "the necessities of the story's informing idea, which require the sharpness of radical foreshortening." Other critics, however, see these undeveloped characters as a flaw—such as Kathryn Schulz in her essay "Why I Despise The Great Gatsby" (2013)—since they are only "types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent. Old money, the American dream, organized crime."

As Forster notes, however, so-called flat characters serve an important role in a story because they "never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere." Moreover, the complexity of a story "requires flat people as well as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life more accurately." Even though flat characters do not change over the course of a novel, they serve as agents of change for characters who are more fully developed. In Fitzgerald's novel, there is only one round character who changes from beginning to end: Nick Carraway, the narrator. Despite the title's focus on Gatsby, it is through the eyes of Nick that we understand the significance of Gatsby's story—and it is through Nick's transformation that Fitzgerald reveals his overall theme.

When Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald's editor at Scribner's, read an initial manuscript of the novel, he praised Fitzgerald for his choice of Nick as narrator: "You adopted exactly the right method of telling it, that of employing a narrator who is more of a spectator than an actor: this puts the reader upon a point of observation on a higher level than that on which the characters stand and at a distance that gives perspective." In Perkins' estimation, Nick is a stable, objective, morally-grounded observer who can accurately evaluate the conduct of others, an opinion that was widely held by critics when the novel was published. Since there is no record of Fitzgerald's countering Perkins' assertion in subsequent letters, most believe that Fitzgerald agreed with Perkins' assessment.

Fitzgerald certainly uses the opening paragraphs of the novel to convince us of Nick's credibility. When Nick declares "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth," he implies that he possesses virtues that others do not. Nick believes he has inherited his ethical nature by the fact that his family has been "prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations." Nick's father reinforces his sense of moral superiority by "snobbishly" telling his son, "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone [. . .] just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'"

Nick claims that his moral upbringing has made him "inclined to reserve all judgements," but he then acknowledges that "after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit." Ultimately, we know that Nick will cast judgment on others when he declares that upon returning to the Midwest, he "wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever." From the opening paragraphs, we understand that Nick's story is meant to be a morality tale. We expect other people will behave badly, and we also expect Nick, our first-person narrator, will serve as the moral arbiter who will evaluate and comment on the nature of their transgressions.

The problem for modern critics, however, is that Nick undermines his own credibility by not acting in an honest, ethical manner. In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth introduced the concept of an "unreliable" narrator as one who “pretends to qualities which the author denies him.” Thomas Boyle used Booth's definition in "Unreliable Narration in The Great Gatsby" (1969) to declare that despite Nick's claim of possessing "fundamental decencies," he proves through his words and actions that he is "shallow, confused, hypocritical, and immoral." As a result, Boyle contends that we cannot trust Nick's judgment on what he sees, and he sacrifices his self-professed role as "a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler" who will morally enlighten us on his journey to New York.

We first question Nick's character when we consider his decision to begin a relationship with Jordan Baker, a professional golfer and childhood friend of Daisy's. When Nick first meets her at the Buchanan mansion, she is depicted as arrogant, aloof, and rude:

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length

at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little

as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she

saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed I was almost

surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

When Daisy introduces him, Nick observes that "Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright." The sarcastic tone of Nick's depiction reveals his negative feelings, which are only exacerbated later in the novel when he witnesses her lying about leaving the top down on a borrowed car she had left out in the rain. It is after that incident that Nick also remembers reading a story about her cheating in a golf tournament a few years prior, which leads to his conclusion that she was "incurably dishonest." Despite these misgivings, Nick begins to date her, most likely for the simple reason that he is lonely and "enjoyed looking at her."

On the night they meet at the Buchanans, Jordan reveals to Nick that Tom is having an affair with "some woman in New York." Nick says that his first "instinct was to telephone immediately for the police," seemingly appalled at Tom's infidelity. When Nick discovers that Daisy knows about the affair, he thinks that "the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms." After it becomes apparent that "there were no such intentions in her head," Nick drives away that night feeling "confused and little disgusted" with both of them. In the very next chapter, however, Nick accompanies Tom to Manhattan and says nothing when they stop in the valley of ashes to meet Tom's mistress. Moreover, when Myrtle joins them in the city, Nick spends the rest of the evening getting drunk with them and never objects to Tom's cheating on his wife, who also happens to be Nick's cousin.

Similarly, Nick shows no hesitation when arranging a clandestine meeting between Daisy and Gatsby. When Jordan tells Nick about Gatsby's past with Daisy and his request that Nick invite Daisy over to his house without Tom so he can reunite with her, Nick claims that he was "shook" by Gatsby's request—not for its immorality, but by "[t]he modesty of the demand." He asks Jordan incredulously, "Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?" For Nick, Gatsby's request for him to facilitate an extramarital liaison is "such a little thing." Nick's complicity in these subterfuges makes it hard to take him seriously when he claims early in the novel that "[e]veryone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."

Perhaps the most damning criticism of Nick's integrity, however, is his failure to reveal the truth after Gatsby's death. Rather than being a man of principle, Gary Scrimgeour argues in "Against The Great Gatsby" (1966) that Nick's "main principle is to say nothing." During the inquest, Michaelis tells the police that George Wilson suspected that his wife was having an affair, but when the police question Myrtle's sister, Catherine, she lies and says that "her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever." Nick claims that Catherine's determination to conceal the truth "showed a surprising amount of character." As Scrimgeour asks rhetorically, "Is [Nick's] behavior here, or even his attitude, superior to that of Tom, Daisy, Gatsby, or any other of the inhabitants of the ashland?"

Despite the modern critical consensus that Nick is an unreliable narrator, Taylor Murtaugh argues in "Why We Believe Nick Carraway: Narrative Reliability & American Identity in The Great Gatsby (2013) that "the best approach to teaching the book as a critique of the American dream may be to reinstate Carraway as a trustworthy guide." Murtaugh believes that teachers need to use Nick a "moral exemplar" to show students that it is possible "to remain untainted in the world of materialism and value the other blessings of life outside the ephemerality of physical possessions." If students question Nick's morality, Murtaugh claims that his decision to return home at the end of the novel becomes compromised. For this reason, Murtaugh argues that there is "pedagogical justification" to present Nick as remaining "pure of heart" throughout the novel in order to promote Fitzgerald’s "social commentary regarding materialism and the need to revert back to traditional Western virtues."

To teach the novel in this manner, however, is not just intellectually dishonest, but it also suggests a simplistic solution to a complex problem. The fact is that Nick is not "pure of heart"—nor is anyone who has grown up in a corrupted America. Nick returns to the Midwest not to escape the corruption of the East, but to cleanse the corruption that he has discovered in himself. That corruption, however, did not originate in New York. Nick did not leave the Midwest as an innocent, but as someone who "enjoyed" the Great War "so thoroughly" that he "came back restless." He now saw the Midwest as no longer "the warm center of the world," but rather as "the ragged edge of the universe." When he travels east, which he thinks will be "permanently," he is convinced of "its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old."

Instead of being "untainted by materialism," as Murtaugh contends, Nick goes to New York to "learn the bond business," lining his bookshelf with "a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities" with the hope that they will one day "unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew." In other words, Nick goes to New York with one clear intent: to make money. He has no inherent interest in the financial world, seemingly choosing his profession only to conform to the societal expectations of the typical Yale graduate: "Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man." He does not even make this decision independently, relying instead on the approval of his aunts and uncles back in the Midwest who "talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, 'Why—ye-es' with very grave, hesitant faces."

Despite claiming that he liked New York—"the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye"—Nick's time in the East is filled with boredom, emptiness, and melancholy: "I took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day—and then I went upstairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour." He acknowledges that he felt "a haunting loneliness sometimes" and identified with those "poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." It is most likely that Nick's loneliness and ennui compelled him to begin his relationship with Jordan.

When Nick describes kissing Jordan, it is devoid of any romantic passion: "Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and so I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face." Nick dates Jordan because she is convenient, not because he has a sincere interest in her. The shallowness of their relationship mirrors Tom and Daisy's pointless existence. Nick claims they lived in France "for no particular reason [. . .] drifting here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together." Daisy best expresses the emptiness of their lives when she asks, "What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon [. . .] and the day after that, and the next thirty years?"

It is no wonder, then, that both Nick and Daisy are drawn to the magnetic Gatsby. When Nick finds out the reason for Gatsby's buying his house and hosting parties every weekend, he writes, "He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor." What differentiates Gatsby from the other characters is his profound sense of purpose, his relentless pursuit of Daisy given almost a religious connotation when Nick compares it to "the following of a grail." In contrast to Nick's mundane life, Gatsby possesses "an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness" that Nick has "never found in any other person" and believes unlikely that he "will ever find again." Despite the fact that Gatsby represented everything for which Nick has "an unaffected scorn," there is still "something gorgeous" about him, "some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" that Nick both admires and envies.

For that reason, Gatsby is "exempt" from Nick's condemnation; instead, Nick claims that it was "what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams" that led to his tragic downfall. Nick portrays Gatsby as a victim who has been blinded by "the colossal vitality of his illusion." The "foul dust" is the inevitable consequence of the American belief that anything is possible, that one can create a future without any consideration of the past. Gatsby not only rejects his parents, who were "shiftless and unsuccessful farm people," but he also rejects his past identity as "James Gatz of North Dakota." Instead, he creates a fraudulent new persona—"Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island"—an idealized, but fundamentally immature vision that was "just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."

The empathy that Nick maintains for Gatsby, despite his flaws, is because he recognizes that he also has been the victim of a fraudulent, self-delusion. After Gatsby's death, Nick decides to end his relationship with Jordan and return to the Midwest. Before he leaves, however, he wants to do the right thing and see her in person, recognizing that he has behaved poorly: "I wanted leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away." This admission is the beginning of Nick's moral transformation. We are meant to contrast Nick's accountability with Tom and Daisy's irresponsibility. Nick concludes that Tom and Daisy were "careless people" who "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."

When Jordan accuses Nick of not having been honest with her during their relationship, she reminds him of a conversation they had about bad drivers:

"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver. Well,

I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such

a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person.

I thought it was your secret pride."

Jordan is accurate in her assessment of Nick—and Nick knows it. To his credit, however, Nick accepts her criticism and acknowledges his culpability, replying, "I'm thirty. [. . . ] I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor." Nick knows that he has misled Jordan and made her think that he was genuinely interested in her. As he walks away, he feels "tremendously sorry" for his duplicity and also "angry"—not at her, but at himself.

After his experience in the East, Nick now begins to see clearly the "foul dust" that has floated in the wake of his own dreams and ambitions. He recognizes his selfishness and the corrupt materialism and restlessness that compelled him to leave home in the first place. What Nick sees in himself, he also recognizes in others: "I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life." Nick recognizes that they all have been corrupted, but not by "Eastern life"; instead, it is by the dreams and ambitions that attracted them to "Eastern life" in the first place.

In the rhapsodic final paragraphs of the novel, Nick expands his vision to include all Americans, past and present, who have been corrupted by their idealized dreams of the future. Nick imagines the "wonder" that the "Dutch sailors" must have had when they first set eyes on the "fresh green breast of the new world," transfixed for a "transitory enchanted moment" as they "held [their] breath in the presence of this continent." Nick then compares the Dutch sailors' "aesthetic contemplation" of what was possible to "Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock." Fitzgerald then connects Gatsby to Nick—and, by extension, to the readers as well—when he switches from past to present tense and from third-person singular to first-person plural: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us."

Rather than heroic, Gatsby should be seen as a tragic figure—just as Nick and we will be if we embrace our own "grotesque and fantastic conceits." Nick's return to the Midwest is an attempt to redirect his life and reconnect with his former self, one that has not yet been corrupted. When Gatsby's father comes to his funeral, he brings with him a copy of Hopalong Cassidy that contains a daily schedule for self-improvement that the young James Gatz wrote on the inside back cover. The schedule is an allusion to a chapter in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography entitled, "Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection" (1791), where he asked himself each morning, "What good shall I do this day?" When we contrast Franklin's aspirations with those of Gatsby and Nick—and, by extension, our own—Fitzgerald's theme becomes clear.

Franklin's pursuit of moral perfection stands in stark contrast to the materialistic ambitions that have turned America into a "valley of ashes." Just as the descendants of those first "Dutch sailors" left behind "vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house," so too have we created a "foul dust" that floats in the wake of our dreams. As Nick prepares to return to the Midwest, he remembers the "thrilling, returning trains" of his youth when he came home for Christmas as a student in the East. He recalls that when "a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air," he was compelled to take "deep breaths of it" and remembered that in that moment he and the other students became "unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again." Nick has rediscovered his appreciation for where he was raised, declaring, "That's my middle-west [. . .]. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name."

Through Nick's example, Fitzgerald suggests that we, too, should shed our complacency and rethink who we are and what we value—not just as individuals, but as a country. Fitzgerald implies that chasing after materialistic dreams is a fool's errand and ultimately self-destructive. Just as Gatsby is ruined by the "colossal vitality of his illusion," so too are we who have been corrupted by collective self-delusion: "It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—". While some might contend that chasing after an impossible dream is a noble endeavor, Fitzgerald implies that not only is it futile, but it will result in a fate as disastrous as Gatsby's.

Instead, Nick offers an alternative vision. Rather than try to be something we are not, perhaps we should try to be better versions of who we already are. Rather than trying to "beat on, boats against the current," perhaps we should drop the oars and let ourselves be "borne back ceaselessly into the past" to see what we can discover there. Perhaps we will find what Nick is reminded of when he imagines the moment right before Gatsby kissed Daisy for the first time and "forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath":

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded

of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard

somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my

mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling

upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had

almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

What Nick is perhaps searching for is his lost innocence, something that resides in an irrecoverable past.

But even if we can never regain a lost paradise—individually or as a country—we can still try to make amends for where we have gone astray. Nick may be an imperfect guide, just as we are an imperfect country, but it is in his moral growth and emerging self-awareness that perhaps we can find our own possibilities for redemption.