Gatsby Opinion QuestionSome critics see at least two sides to Gatsby’s character. His unsavory and shadowy activities cannot be ignored, of...

While the motif of the American Dream is inverted in the early chapters of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as the reader perceives the decadence and corruption of the Jazz Age, the character of Gatsby is not merely that of a vulgar and ostentatious criminal.  For, Gatsby does not have parties simply to display his wealth.  Often, instead, he watches "the silver pepper of the stars" and "stretches out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way" toward a single green light, far away at the end of a dock.  Clearly, Gatsby is a romantic. 

Even after Daisy has failed him in the tense confrontation in Chapter 7 when Gatsby asks her to tell Tom that she does not love him and she retracts her statements, Gatsby, dressed in his pink suit of innocent faith, keeps vigil all night outside her window after the fatal accident on the return trip--even while she and her husband conspire against him. And, it is Gatsby who does not contradict the idea that he was the driver of the "death car."  So, while he is satirized as Trimalchio and his car no longer has its mythological characteristics, the "young rough-neck whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd" is not ungenuine as Owl-Eyes discovers in the "high Gothic library" where the leather bound books actually contain printed pages.

It is this genuineness that causes Nick to react to Gatsby, "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."  And, as Gatsby heads for his pool, Nick comments in Chapter 8,

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it [the end] would come and 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.  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 thesunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.  A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...

Truly, Jay Gatsby is a tragic figure who put all his faith into an illusive dream.