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Great Gatsby, The

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has been widely hailed as the quintessential American novel, yet essence is precisely what proves elusive in Jay Gatsby and the supporting cast. Trusting their dreams more than their experiences, they trade the substance of reality for hollow representations of an ideal. According to literary critic Harold Bloom, Gatsby's “refusal to surrender to reality” destroys him, “yet it also gives him his peculiar greatness.” An examination of self-deception in Jay Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, and Nick Carraway reveals distinct incongruities between belief and reality that shape the psychological core of the novel: hypocritical prejudice (Nick), base elitism (Tom), and grand delusions (Gatsby).

Nick Carroway

Narrator Nick Carroway's language “is consistently seen to work against the demands of veracity,” according to critic Barbara Will. While keenly attuned to duplicity in others, he is blind to his own shortcomings and biases. For example, after starting a relationship with professional golfer Jordan Baker, Nick casually reveals a “vague understanding” with a girl back home that should be “tactfully broken off.” The reader connects this off-hand remark to his earlier—now suspicious—denial of an engagement. While lying to other characters and misleading the reader, the narrator takes pride in believing himself, “one of the few honest people [he has] ever known.”

Valuing sophistication over truth, Nick respects other liars who are convincing and ridicules those who are awkward. He admires the sister of Tom's mistress for brazen lies displaying “a surprising amount of character” and appears similarly unconcerned when Jordan cheats at golf, musing that “dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.” In stark contrast, Nick scorns Jay Gatsby's “threadbare” yarns, mocking his alleged ruby collection and Oxford education. The reader's perception of the Gatsby characters is doubly clouded, first by their own falsity and second by the narrator's distortions.

Tom Buchanan

Nick's college friend Tom Buchanan deceives himself in a more sinister way. A wealthy graduate of an elite university, he fancies himself a man of superior breeding, the defender of old-fashioned values. However, Tom's racist, misogynistic rants display neither refinement nor morality, and beneath the shallow veneer of a gentleman, Tom is a brute who cheats on his wife, beats his mistress, and participates in a murder.

Tom's “arrogant eyes” seek any opportunity for advantage, even when his wife, Daisy, accidentally runs over his mistress with her suitor Gatsby's car. When Nick observes the married couple deep in conversation (“anybody would have said that they were conspiring together”), he infers that Tom precipitated Gatsby's murder by manipulating the dead mistress's armed and anguished husband. Like a petulant child whose toy has been broken, Tom views his actions as “entirely justified.”

Jay Gatsby

The grandest delusions of all are reserved for Jay Gatsby, a “self-made man” in two senses. From humble beginnings (“Mr. Nobody from Nowhere”), he has amassed great wealth. He has also reinvented his public persona, creating an identity so full of contradictions that even he cannot distinguish who he is from how he presents himself. Having changed his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, he “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” As one Fitzgerald scholar has observed, “Jay Gatsby is the creation of James Gatz, a fictional identity or incognito which is at all times threatened by reality; yet in the end James Gatz comes to seem less real than Jay Gatsby.”

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