Great Gatsby is a tragic hero

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a classic American tragedy. The novel has all the basic elements necessary to classify a story as a tragedy: a tragic hero, his character flaw, and a twist of fate which results in the hero's ultimate destruction. Jay Gatsby is the doomed tragic hero, blinded by his irrational dream to relive the past. Fate interferes in the form of the unexpected manslaughter of one character's mistress by his wife. All these facets of the story come together to cause the end of Gatsby.

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Tragedy in its classical definition is a serious drama typically describing a conflict between the protagonist and a superior force where the hero possesses a tragic flaw that compels him to reach for something or attempt something that has sorrowful or disastrous conclusion that elicits pity or terror. In Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald employed multiple aspects of a tragedy to construct this classical novel as a warning for those who blindly pursue an imperfect and hollow life.

In the classical novel, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald constructed the novel to have its prominent theme be tragedy because he created the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, to be the tragic hero of the novel, he created tragic villains in Tom and Daisy who set Gatsby on a path to his downfall, and Fitzgerald utilized the American 1920’s time period to shape the tragedy of the characters in the book.

In order for a character to be defined as a tragic hero, he must be noble in character.

Jay Gatsby demonstrates this in his devotion to Daisy Buchanan, whom he has been preparing for a re-encounter with for the past 5 years. When he finally finds himself in her presence again, "...there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light..." He talks with Daisy, and even after 5 whole years of building her up in his mind, he is still very much in love with her. "...[After speaking with her,] there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the room." He loves her, everything he does is for her, and there is no characteristic more noble than true love and devotion.

Tanfer Tunc stated that, “[Gatsby was] obsessed with the idea of recreating the past “just as it was,” [he] is blind to Daisy’s selfish, juvenile, and self destructive personality” (Tunc, 2009, p. 74-75). Gatsby, blinded, pursued Daisy for years, with the belief in mind that she would come to him if he had financial success similar to Tom. It was the manner in which he attained wealth, through bootlegging, that reminded Daisy that he is not from ‘old money’ so she could never be with him, even if Gatsby thought she could. In his blind pursuit of Daisy, Gatsby made impaired decisions that lead to his tragic fall, even though the punishment was drastic. As a tragic hero, Gatsby’s ultimate fate was not fully deserved for the flaws he possessed. Nick describes Gatsby after being rejected by Daisy as, “broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice,”(Fitzgerald, 157). Gatsby was the victim to forces outside his own control that built to his tragic death, in particular Tom’s hard malice that broke him in a moment when he felt the most powerful. This was shortly followed by Tom revealing to wilson that it was Gatsby’s car that killed his wife, fully knowing that Wilson would take his revenge on Gatsby. Fitzgerald designing Gatsby to make terrible judgements and be fatally flawed would not be enough to make this novel a tragedy, it would just make the protagonist a pitiful fool, but Fitzgerald also used villainous characters to build the tragedy.

The very denotation of a tragic hero is a noble person with a tragic flaw which helps to bring about his downfall, and which may cause the hero to make poor decisions. Mr. Gatsby's character flaw is his enduring dream of finding Daisy, the woman he met and fell in love with before he was sent to fight in World War I, and reuniting with her. When they met, he was a poor nobody and she was a member of the old-money elite, a match that they both knew could not possibly work. So, even though he knew she was married, when Jay came back from the war, he devoted his life to reinventing himself to make himself good enough for her.

"Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees -- he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder." Basically, his pure, true love for Daisy was reinforced with obsession and encased in determination and wrapped in everything he could find to make it real again. His love for Daisy outweighed any kind of reality to the point where he could no longer distinguish fact from fiction. "It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart." Daisy's return to Tom, her refusal to take responsibility for her part in Myrtle’s death and her absence at Gatsby’s funeral ultimately depict her as equally unprincipled as Tom. It demonstrated that she had no intention of leaving Tom and marrying Gatsby but only to use him for her own self-pleasure until he became a liability. As both Tom and Daisy possess villainous qualities, they’re status compared to Gatsby allowed them to think lesser of Gatsby. As people who inherited their wealth, Tom and Daisy don’t see Gatsby as an equal and that sturs a conflict when he intervenes in their lives. Tanfer Tunc describes it as, “Gatsby, who acquired his wealth through organized crime, is part of this new element of society. As such, he can never participate in the arrogant, inherited ‘old wealth’ of Tom and Daisy, who live in East Egg, the playground of [the] upper class,” (Tunc, 2009, p. 69). As Gatsby attempted to interfere with the world of ‘old money’, he had no realization that he would regret that decision greatly as they are ruthless people who seek only to satisfy themselves, even at the expense of others, which is why Tom told Wilson that it was Gatsby driving the car that killed his wife. Even as Fitzgerald created tragic villains to oppose the tragic hero, he weaponized the time period of the 1920’s to the foundation of all the tragedy in the novel.

Fate, with the tragic flaw, plays the principal role in the undoing of the protagonist. In The Great Gatsby, the turn of fate is when Daisy, driving Gatsby's car with him in the passenger seat, hits and instantly kills Myrtle Wilson, and in a panic flees the scene, too shaken to stop the car. Myrtle Wilson happens to be the woman who Daisy's husband tom has been cheating on her with, and Myrtle's husband George Wilson witnesses the accident. He sees his wife killed by someone driving Gatsby's car. He find out that the car belongs to Gatsby, who he has never met before, and assumes that it was he who had so violently and recklessly killed his wife. George, in a state of grief-stricken insanity, kills Jay Gatsby in his own backyard the very next day. It didn't happen a moment too soon, either.

Just as Gatsby attempted to break into the elite class, other characters also showed a desire to be apart of the elite class too. Myrtle Wilson brought upon her own tragic death as she believed that her exposure to the elite class made her a member of the elite class too. As Tunc described her death, “Myrtle died with her mouth ripped open, as if gasping for air, because her vision of the American Dream left her suffocating in the valley of ashes. The only way out became using her body to acquire the materialism that she believed defined happiness” (Tunc, 2009, p. 77). Myrtle commonly wore elite class clothing to disguise herself as an elitist, but like Gatsby she was unable to comprehend that attaining the American Dream was far more complicated than simply wearing a nice dress and having an affair with someone from East Egg. Therein lies the tragedy of a life that was doomed to disillusionment. Along with Myrtle, George Wilson’s tragic suicide was brought upon himself as a result of the lack of conscienceness of those around him. George Wilson’s murder of Gatsby and suicide thereafter was a byporduct of the social inequality Fitzgerald dipicted in the 20’s in the novel. This was shown when Tom described Wilson as, “He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive” (Fitzgerald, p. 28). The desolation and deprivation of this society indicated the lack of social conscience present in the privileged classes. In particular the case of Tom who exploits Wilson’s blindness to the situation around him to have an affair with his wife and then blame the death of Myrtle on a man who didn’t commit the crime. In order to build an impactful tragedy, Fitzgerald cunningly used setting as a mechanism to enhance the tragedies.

The quality of Gatsby's life had been deteriorating at an exponential rate, ironically, since his dream had come true. Becoming involved with Daisy at this point was upsetting his life -- he had learned firsthand of the shortcomings of the woman he loved, had witnessed her weaknesses. It was tearing him up inside that he had spent half a decade on something that would be mostly detrimental to him in the end. "...perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream." The narrator conjectures of Gatsby that, just before his death, "He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass."

Gatsby's intentions were pure, modest, innocent, genuine, but the momentum of his pursuit carried him into trouble when he was forced to stop dreaming because his dream had become reality, a thing to which Gatsby had become unaccustomed after imagining for so long. Once his dream tumbled into a brick wall and things were sent spinning in disarray, there was no longer a place for Jay Gatsby. He had come to belong only to his dream, and was consumed by it. "...Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."