The Great Gatsby:
Entry for the SAGE Encyclopedia of Lying and Deception
1/1/13
Amanda Levis and Zoë Chance
Yale School of Management
Correspondence should be addressed to Zoë Chance, zoe.chance@yale.edu, 135 Prospect
St, New Haven, CT 06511, phone 857-891-5013.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has been widely hailed as the
quintessential American novel, and its title character as the quintessential example of the
American dream. Yet essence is precisely what proves elusive in Jay Gatsby and the
supporting cast: the absence of anything real beneath veils of pretense and self-deception
defines the novel. Gatsby’s “refusal to surrender to reality kills him, yet it also gives him
his peculiar greatness” (Bloom, 2010). An examination of Jay Gatsby, Tom Buchanan,
and Nick Carraway reveals the three types of self-deception forming the psychological
core of the novel: hypocritical cynicism (Nick), base elitism (Tom), and grandiose
delusions (Gatsby).
Because the reader’s knowledge is filtered through Nick Carraway‘s judgmental
and narrow-minded narration, there is little pretense of honesty in the storytelling: his
“language is consistently seen to work against the demands of veracity” (Will, 2005).
Although Nick credits himself “one of the few honest people I have ever known” (60),
the reader has suspected him since his hypocritical complaint that his inclination “to
reserve all judgments” has made him “the victim of not a few veteran bores” (1).
Valuing sophistication over veracity, Nick respects convincing liars and mocks
awkward ones. He admires a woman whose brazen lies display a “surprising amount of
character” (163), and admits “dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply”
(58). However, he scorns Gatsby’s colorful, “threadbare” yarns (66), mocking the alleged
ruby collection and deriding the too-eager display of an Oxford photograph.
While keenly attuned to duplicity in others, Nick remains oblivious to his own
lies. After starting a relationship, he casually reveals a “vague understanding” with a girl
back home that should be “tactfully broken off” (60), which the reader connects to his
earlier—now suspicious—denial of an engagement. The reader’s perception of the other
characters is doubly clouded: first by their own falsity, then by the narrator’s distortion
and cynicism.
Nick’s college friend, Tom Buchanan, is self-deceived in a different way. A
wealthy graduate of an elite university, he fancies himself a man of superior breeding, the
defender of old-fashioned values. However, his racist, misogynistic rants display no
refinement or morality. Beneath the shallow veneer of a gentleman, Tom is a brutish,
primitive savage who cheats on his wife, beats his mistress, and is implicated in two
deaths.
Tom’s “arrogant eyes” (7) seek any opportunity for advantage, even when his
wife, Daisy, accidentally runs over his mistress with her suitor Gatsby’s car. When Nick
observes Tom and Daisy in deep conversation (“anybody would have said that they were
conspiring together, ” 146), he suggests Tom precipitated Gatsby’s murder by sending
the cuckolded husband to Gatsby’s house with a gun. Playing the role of a petulant child
whose toy has been broken, the self-deceived Tom views his actions as “entirely
justified” (179).
Finally, there are the grand delusions of Jay Gatsby, a “self-made man” in two
senses. From humble beginnings (“Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” 130), he has amassed
great wealth. His persona is also an invention, so full of contradictions that even he
cannot distinguish who he is from how he presents himself. Changing his name from
James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, he “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (98). As
Fitzgerald scholars have observed, “Jay Gatsby is the creation of James Gatz, a fictional
identity or incognito which is at all times threatened by reality; yet in the end James Gatz
comes to seem less real than Jay Gatsby” (Long, 1966).
Gatsby appears as a magician cloaked in mystery, repeatedly “vanishing” from
view, presiding over carnival-style “amusement park” fêtes (41), driving a “circus
wagon” (121), and flashing cards and photographs linking him to prestige, money, and
power. He is rumored a killer, an Oxford scholar, a German spy. A party guest calls him
“a regular Belasco” (45). Drawing this parallel with the Broadway producer David
Belasco, known for creating naturalistic sets, Fitzgerald suggests the elaborate set of
Gatsby’s mansion, and even his carefully cultivated life, are representations of an ideal,
no more than stagecraft (Parkinson, 2003).
In the published novel, Fitzgerald deleted a passage from Gatsby’s childhood,
which he published as the short story “Absolution” (Bloom, 2010). The child protagonist
is described as one who “like all those who habitually and instinctively lie,” has an
“enormous respect and awe for the truth” (Fitzgerald, 1924). As an adult, Gatsby has
transformed his unbalanced esteem for the truth into an equally disproportionate
obsession with Daisy, with his dream of what she represents both in his past and in his
vision of their shared future. Daisy appears as a dream without substance, defined and
redefined by the men who love her (Parkinson 2003), and providing no basis for Gatsby’s
delusion that she will leave Tom for him. Nick, expressing sympathy based in his own
shallowness, considers it a boon when Gatsby’s murder saves him from being forced to
surrender his dream.
The final step in Fitzgerald’s exploration of self-deception lies in the reinvention
of Gatsby as a heroic comrade. This fraud, bootlegger, and adulterer, for whom Nick had
“an unaffected scorn” “turned out all right at the end” (2) and becomes—without any act
of redemption--“worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154). This about-face is
dramatically illustrated when Nick finds an unspoken obscene word scrawled on the steps
of the late Gatsby’s mansion. He effaces this word himself, wiping it out with his shoe,
before buoying the reader along to an image of a suddenly heroic Gatsby, inviting the
reader to stand where Gatsby once did, reaching for “the green light, the orgiastic future
that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter…” (180). If
Daisy is the elusive American dream, Gatsby “comes inevitably to stand for America
itself” (Trilling, 1963, 17). Rather than continuing to judge him, the reader readily takes
his place in delusion, reaching out toward the green light symbolizing all hopes realized.
References
Bloom, Harold (ed.) (2010) Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Infobase.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1924) “Absolution,” The American Mercury.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1925) The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Parkinson, Kathleen (2003) Penguin Critical Studies: The Great Gatsby. New York, NY:
Penguin.
Trilling, Lionel (1963) "F. Scott Fitzgerald." In F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Will, Barbara (2005) “The Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word,” College Literature,
32(4), 125-144.