Great Gatsby Essay

The Great Gatsby, a novel authored by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about the highly acclaimed great Gatsby. There it is again the word “great”, now there is no issue with the word itself, its’s aggrandized around what it achieves. Once the word is placed before a noun it manipulates us into having a naïve attitude, it creates a façade. Furthermore, that was precisely the result with Jay Gatsby, we became so distracted by his “greatness” to comprehend that it only came with his name and not through his character.
Jay Gatsby, previously known as Jay Gatz, ascended from an impoverished childhood to become astonishing opulent. To achieve this dream, he changed his name and engaged in organised crime activities on top of that he went through all this trouble …show more content…
Whenever his name is mentioned, it’s either a rumour, “It’s more that he was a German spy during the war”; his accomplishments, “’Major Jay Gatsby’, I read, ‘For Valour Extraordinary’” or depreciation, which would be Tom implying that Gatsby is presumptuous. Although nobody ever seems to comment on his personality. Over the progression of the story, we the readers, get to see, primarily, one side of Gatsby, which is his façade and through this we are left to distinguish fractions of his personality for ourselves. Jay Gatsby was a dishonest man, he was aloof, an optimist, a dreamer, a lovesick fool and lastly a hopeless nostalgic.
Indeed, Gatsby was great, it can obviously be noticed through his wealth but he never had the personality to be deemed great. There are various reasons as to what makes someone great or why they are, the thing with Gatsby was that he used his “greatness” to create a façade that helped him achieve Daisy’s standards and that is where the problem arises. Because of this he achieved his dream for someone else on not for his own self-worth and development, which left his personality to be the face behind the