The Mediocre Gatsby

The best protagonist I have yet to encounter in any work of fiction is a character named Taylor Hebert from a web serial called Worm. An introverted teenager with the ability to telepathically control bugs, she becomes a supervillain fairly early on and proceeds to commit a wide variety of morally questionable acts over the course of the story, inflicting unnecessary harm in her desire to seem intimidating and eventually killing several people in an ultimately unjustified bout of rage. However, despite all this Taylor remains a sympathetic and even sincerely relatable character. While her actions are often extreme, they are always performed in service to sympathetic goals, backed by understandable reasoning. The reader can imagine themselves making the same decisions if they were placed in the same situation. The same cannot be said of Jay Gatsby, protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. His behavior systematically eliminates his appeal to the reader, lessening the impact of the book’s tragic plot. The unsympathetic nature of Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy and the problematic ways in which he acts on this fixation leave the reader repulsed by his character and uninvested in his story.

Gatsby’s extreme devotion to his perfect mental image of Daisy, a disagreeable individual he has not seen in years, makes it difficult for the reader to care about him. From her very first appearance, Daisy Buchanan is a profoundly unlikeable character. She has a vapid, cloying sweetness which is made all the more irritating by Nick’s consistently positive descriptions of her. Daisy’s casual agreement with her husband’s white supremacy does her no favors, and the reader’s dislike of her is cemented by her proclamation that “that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (21). Gatsby, on the other hand, is absolutely obsessed with the woman he considers the epitome of beauty. After Daisy is married and Gatsby spends years without seeing her, he goes so far as to buy a mansion close enough to her residence that he can surreptitiously search for an opportunity to meet her again. The fixation indicated by this stalking is confirmed when he finally arranges a meeting and “he hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes” (97). Gatsby’s infatuation with Daisy is the driving force of his character, motivating most of the actions he takes during the novel. However, to a reader with negative view of Daisy herself, this overriding focus makes Gatsby thoroughly unsympathetic. It is challenging to summon any real emotion at the later misfortunes of a character whose goals are so hard for the reader to share. In particular, it is difficult to empathize with the frequently callous and harmful decisions Gatsby makes in his unhealthy pursuit of an idealized version of Daisy.

Gatsby’s disregard for Daisy’s agency and his willingness to act unethically in an attempt to preserve his relationship with her further strengthen the reader’s lack of investment in him as a protagonist. Despite his insistence that he loves Daisy deeply, Gatsby has very little respect for her as an independent person. When his infatuation with Daisy is discovered by Tom, he cries “[Marrying you] was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!” (137) before she has a chance to offer her thoughts on the subject. Throughout the rest of the conversation, he continues to make broad claims about her emotions rather than listening to what she is actually saying. The fact that Gatsby cares so little about the true feelings of the person he purports to love above all else is clear evidence of his selfishness. Even worse, however, is his handling the incident which kills Myrtle. “The ‘death car,’ as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop; it came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then disappeared around the next bend” (144). Gatsby takes control of the car after Daisy hits Myrtle, but rather than stopping to give aid and make it known who was responsible, he flees the scene. He does not even know whether Myrtle was killed until Nick talks to him later, and has no real reaction to learning of her death. Such callous behavior is not necessarily a bad trait in a protagonist, but when motivated by personal cowardice and overprotective obsession with an unsympathetic love interest it is a real obstacle to investment in the character. When Gatsby is killed as a result of this choice, his death evokes little emotion.

In the end, the appeal of The Great Gatsby is fundamentally compromised by the unsympathetic nature of its titular protagonist. The novel is essentially a tragedy, but it is hard to muster much emotion at Gatsby’s fall when one dislikes him so much. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that none of the other characters are worthy of investment either. Daisy is self-centered and insipid, Tom is a physically abusive white supremacist, Jordan is too aloof to evoke much sympathy, and even Nick is consistently hypocritical, professing to be an impartial observer who withholds judgement while in actuality alternating unpredictably between  inexplicable admiration and moralistic denouncements of his fellow characters. It is difficult to become invested in fictional events involving individuals for whom one’s feelings are almost exclusively those of distaste, and so the reader has little reason to care who gets a happy ending. The Great Gatsby may provide a valuable commentary on the life of the American upper class in the 1920s, but to a modern audience it is a failure as a character drama.