The Great Gatsby Criticism and Analysis

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The Great Gatsby Criticism and Interpretations

How did readers first respond to The Great Gatsby, how did it become a classic, and what do critics argue about today? This guide traces the novel’s reputation from 1925 to the present and introduces the main ways of reading it.

First Reactions in 1925

When the novel appeared in April 1925, reviews were mixed. Some reviewers found the story slight or its characters unpleasant. H. L. Mencken, one of the most influential critics of the day, wrote that the story was “in form no more than a glorified anecdote,” while praising the charm and beauty of Fitzgerald’s writing.

Other readers saw at once that something new had arrived. T. S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald in a letter dated December 31, 1925, that the novel seemed to him “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Sales, however, were disappointing compared with Fitzgerald’s earlier books, and the novel was far from a bestseller during his lifetime.

From Disappointment to Classic

When Fitzgerald died in December 1940, the book was little read. Its revival began soon after. Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s friend from Princeton, edited his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon for publication in 1941, in a volume that also included The Great Gatsby. In 1945 the novel was issued as one of the compact, pocket-sized Armed Services Editions printed for American servicemen, putting some 155,000 copies into readers’ hands.

In the 1940s and 1950s critics and scholars championed Fitzgerald. Lionel Trilling wrote the introduction to a 1945 New Directions edition of the novel, and Arthur Mizener published the first biography, The Far Side of Paradise, in 1951. The novel entered high school and college classrooms, where it has stayed. In 1998 the Modern Library ranked it second on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century.

Major Ways of Reading the Novel

The American Dream and Its Failure

The most common reading sees Gatsby as an embodiment of the American Dream: a self-made man whose idealism is corrupted by money and defeated by the closed world of inherited wealth. Critics in this tradition focus on the green light and the final page, which links Gatsby’s hope to the first European sight of the continent.

Class and Economics

Readings focused on class look at the divide between East Egg, West Egg and the valley of ashes, and at the way the wealthy escape the consequences of their actions while the Wilsons pay the price. Nick’s description of Tom and Daisy as “careless people” is central to this view.

The Unreliable Narrator

Nick calls himself “one of the few honest people that I have ever known,” but many critics doubt him. He helps arrange an affair, conceals what he knows about Myrtle’s death and admires Gatsby despite claiming to disapprove of him. Reading Nick as unreliable changes the novel from a tribute to Gatsby into a study of the storyteller himself.

Gender and Feminist Readings

Feminist critics examine how Daisy, Jordan and Myrtle are seen almost entirely through male eyes. Daisy can be read as a shallow object of desire or as a woman with very few real choices in a world controlled by men like Tom.

Race, Ethnicity and Identity

Tom’s fear of “the Colored Empires,” the brief scene of a car driven by a white chauffeur carrying wealthy Black passengers as Nick and Gatsby cross Blackwell’s Island into the city, and the stereotyped portrait of Meyer Wolfshiem have all drawn close attention. Some critics have argued that Gatsby’s uncertain origins reflect American anxieties about immigration, race and who counts as an insider in the 1920s.

Queer Readings

Some readers point to Nick’s intense attention to Gatsby and an ambiguous scene with Mr. McKee at the end of Chapter 2 to suggest that Nick’s feelings are more complicated than he admits.

Modernism and Style

Formal critics admire the novel’s compression, its patterns of imagery and its careful structure. Gatsby’s past is revealed out of order, so the reader, like Nick, pieces him together gradually. The novel is often studied alongside other modernist works of the 1920s for its concern with loss and its fragmented sense of a world after the First World War.

Questions Critics Still Debate

Is Gatsby admirable, pitiable or both?
How far should we trust Nick’s judgements?
Does the novel criticise the wealthy or romanticise them?
Is the ending hopeful, despairing or something in between?

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