The Great Gatsby, Morality and Consequences

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway moves to New York from the mid-west and meets one Jay Gatsby, an enterprising nouveau riche (though he claims to be from old money). Gatsby imitates an Oxford accent and loves calling everybody “Old Sport”, his parties are known all through the West Egg – and he has as many secrets as he has dollars. In the end, his passion for a young woman named Daisy leads to his death; but did Gatsby deserve his fate, or was destiny conspiring against him?

Gatsby did not start off his story well. Before the start of the novel, he meets Daisy for the first time, as a young army lad with little to his name. His name was not Gatsby at the time, but rather Gatz. In an attempt to impress the pampered young girl, he lies about his background, letting her believe he is of old money, can take care of her as she has been taken care of since she was small. “He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretenses. I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself – that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities – he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.” (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

While he does ‘remarkably well’ in the war, by the end of it he is delayed at Oxford, and must delay his return home. Daisy, on the other hand, begins to feel the pressure of the immoral world around her, and as she waits for Gatsby to return home, eventually caves in to the growing force and marries a man named Tom Buchanan, a ‘wholesomely bulky’ man who gives her a feeling of safety. Gatsby is left behind with no word but a letter announcing their marriage, which arrives while he is still at Oxford.

This should have ended the story. As if Gatsby hasn’t dug himself a big enough hole by creating an entire background that doesn’t exist, he now inserts himself into a larger drama; he refuses to give up on Daisy, even though now she is another man’s wife. Not that Tom is a moral man himself; he starts an affair with one Myrtle Wilson. However, does this excuse Gatsby’s actions?

Gatsby creates an entire new persona at the expense of his morality. He traffics grain alcohol over the counter illegally (in the midst of the Prohibition). His money grows, and he buys a house in West Egg, New York, near where he knows Daisy is living. His house is lavish, his parties elaborate, his hospitality famous. Later in the novel it is found that he simply did this to attract attention to himself, at the hopes that Daisy would notice his lavish estate and wander over during one of his parties.

It is at this point, at the height of Gatsby’s manufactured persona, that Nick meets him. “He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished – and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I”d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.” (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Gatsby realizes that Nick knows Daisy – they are cousins – and asks Nick to reunite the two (without revealing to Nick their background). Nick does so, but soon Tom becomes suspicious and jealous of his wife’s new friend. Finally Tom confronts both Gatsby and Daisy, exposing Gatsby’s life of crime – “‘I found out what your ‘drug-stores’ were.’ He[Tom] turned to us and spoke rapidly. ‘He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.'”(The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Daisy asserts that she loves Tom most, and Tom insists that Daisy and Gatsby head home together, just to prove that he has nothing to lose. But on the way home, Daisy accidentally hits and kills Myrtle Wilson. Gatsby, lying again, takes the blame, and ends up meeting his end in his pool when Myrtle Wilson’s husband comes looking for revenge.

There are many people who would insist, “But Gatsby did it all for love! Besides, liquor isn’t a bad thing, it was ridiculous for it to be outlawed. Gatsby didn’t really do anything wrong.”

Any person with a strong moral standing knows this is nonsense. Gatsby lies innumerable times, schemes, breaks the law, attempts to steal another man’s wife, and all in the persona of an elaborate artist, an entertainer of the most twisted sort, an actor who has forgotten that the play is but make-believe. In the end, his own inability to accept the truth and the moral consequences of such a truth is what leads him to his doom. No evil fate sentenced his actions. Gatsby both blindfolded and led himself to the plank, pushing himself into an ocean of immorality that, in the end, even his confident charisma couldn’t swim.