Is Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald´s The Great Gatsby, a Good Man?

To decide whether Jay Gatsby is a good man or not, one must define what a ‘good man’ really is. Although it is an extremely vague and layered term, a ‘good man’ best fits the description of a man whose intentions are never meant to harm anyone. In addition, readers must remember that the Gatsby in the novel is Nick Carraway’s version, and that is a very biased version. Yet, based off of the events depicted in The Great Gatsby, I believe that Jay Gatsby is a good man.

Gatsby is not formally introduced until chapter three, and due to his initial description, readers hold him in much higher regard than other characters in the novel. Nick introduces Gatsby in an extremely intriguing and flattering manner, saying, “He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you seemed to come across four or five times in life” (Fitzgerald 48). Gatsby’s introduction is completely opposite of Tom Buchanan’s, in which Nick uses words like “physical” and “powerful” to illustrate Tom as a stereotypical dumb jock and bully (6). Yet, despite the biases created within readers by Nick from the beginning of the novel, Gatsby does not purposefully harm anyone, as far as the reader knows, which leads me to believe that he is a ‘good man’.

One may argue that Jay Gatsby is not a ‘good man’ by discussing his illegal profession of bootlegging. This argument is flawed though, because Gatsby began bootlegging for Meyer Wolfsheim after World War One, and as a poor and starving veteran, was offered a free lunch and a job. Any man who is living the poor conditions that Gatsby was at the time would likely never decline a job offer, especially if it was a morally sound one. Y...

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... he “disapproved of him from beginning to end”, I believe that this is Nick criticizing himself for doubting Gatsby while he was alive, and only believing in him, as a person, once he had already died.

Ultimately, only the reader alone can decide whether Jay Gatsby is a ‘good man’, or not. To make this decision, one would not only have to understand the aforementioned, but would also have to believe that Daisy Buchanan was driving the car that killed Myrtle Wilson. I believe that Daisy was driving Gatsby’s car home from the plaza hotel, and that any harm caused to the novel’s other characters by Gatsby was unintentional. Jay Gatsby is a good man who wants to be seen as an insider by old money types and his treatment as an outsider by these types results in tragedy.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. S. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Print.