Conflict

Fitzgerald uses a combination of internal and external conflict in The Great Gatsby to portray his theme. Nick, the narrator, experiences internal conflict against himself and his opinions of the people of this rich society. His brutally honest opinions of society's finest caused an external conflict between him and the wealthy and him and society, who praised the rich and their living style. One example of Nick's external conflicts, "man versus man", is when he saw Tom after Gatsby's death; ""What's the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?" "Yes. You know what I think of you." "You're crazy, Nick," he said quickly. "Crazy as hell. I don't know what's the matter with you."" (Fitzgerald 178). The internal conflict Nick had as an ongoing result of his association with the rich people led to his final judgement, which obviously led to an external conflict, as depicted above. Nick, through his negligence of the wealthy, also defies their lifestyle and role in society, that they shouldn't be worshiped and seen for more than they are--corrupt and dishonest, living under the facade of society.

Gatsby had mostly internal conflicts with his past and his love for Daisy, but he also had external conflicts against fate and Tom. Gatsby continually battles his past and the affect it had on his fate throughout the entire book and Gatsby also fights with Tom to see who would win the heart of Daisy, as described by Fitzgerald; ""You're wife doesn't love you," said Gatsby. "She's never loved you. She loves me." "You must be crazy!" exclaimed Tom automatically." (Fitzgerald 130).

Tom, more of a shallow, flat character has external fights with Gatsby, Myrtle, Nick, and Daisy. He is a confrontational character who pulls together the conflict of all the characters but his lack of emotional expression allows him to have very little to no internal conflicts. Tom relies on his physique to aid him in his external conflicts, as well as his gruff, aggressive attitude.

Overall, the conflict in the Great Gatsby includes a wide variety of internal and external conflict, ranging from man versus man, man versus fate, man versus society, and man versus self to create a dynamic plot.

Characterization

Jay Gatsby, the main character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, is one of the most nondescript characters in American literature. Gatsby, a round character, is continually shrouded with endless stories and gossip that create many aspects of his character and also mystify his character, who is never fully exposed. Fitzgerald's indirect characterization and implicit descriptions of Gatsby, causes readers to wonder at his true character. Like a wooden idol covered with gold, Gatsby wore a glittering facade over his true wooden nature as he transformed more and more into Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald illustrates Gatsby's layered, created character that hides underneath a golden mask by stating
             "The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic                              conception of himself. He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means anything, means                    just that--and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and                          meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old                      boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end" (Fitzgerald                  98).
Gatsby, as a boy, was able to look beyond his mediocrity and create the life he felt he deserved by divine favor, a life that was as rich and glamorous as that of a god and so that is what he created--a god, in the form of Jay Gatsby, who lived this life in his mind with perfect flawlessness and that became his identity, one that he struggled daily to maintain. Gatsby, through his desperate attempts to bury his past and maintain his perfect facade, makes himself look more like James Gatz stuck in an unfamiliar dream than he does Jay Gatsby who lives in perfection. The only thing that is thoroughly and explicitly described about Gatsby is his smile, which Fitzgerald describes as
              "...one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come                      across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an                instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in my favor. It                                understood you as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to                  believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your                  best, you hoped to convey" (Fitzgerald 48).
Gatsby, though his true character is never definite, always came alive to Nick when he smiled; he was his most genuine self through his smile. No matter what else he did, his smile was a constant in his character that provided stability for an otherwise vague character.

Fitzgerald, through implicit characterization, created Gatsby as a round character and who's indistinct nature, blurred by the decadent facades and the gossip, lies, and rumors continually spread about him, leaves other characters and the readers wondering about the kind of man he really is and the kind of past he really has, but yet, the only thing explicitly described about Gatsby is his smile, a constant in his character that is a genuine reminder to Nick of Gatsby's good nature.

Theme

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses the famous symbol of the green light to convey the theme of unattainable goals in the past. Gatsby was always reaching, striving, towards the green light, seeming to get closer and closer but never close enough; his dream, as Fitzgerald described it,
              "...his dream must seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that                it was already behind him...Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year                  by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run                        faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning----So we beat on, boats against                    the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (Fitzgerald 180).
The green light, to Gatsby, was Daisy, who was everything he wanted to be in life--the perfect match for the perfect Jay Gatsby. Everything Daisy had wanted prior to Tom, Gatsby became, and that was the Daisy that he treasured and held onto, despite all the changes she had undergone during those years of separation and the lavish, tasteful life she currently enjoyed with Tom as an "old money" power couple, yet Gatsby continued to believe that he could be all that and more because of their love. Their current experiences disappointed him in his ever-hungering thirst for her love, so he continued to travel back in time, back to a time when he was her lover, to a time when he could recover himself, "...I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place  and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was..."; he wanted to recover every part of himself that he had lost loving her and never letting go of that same girl he loved five years ago (Fitzgerald 110). Fitzgerald paints Daisy also as the general unattainable goal because she is never fully obtained; she sits right in between Tom and Gatsby, technically one of Tom's possessions, but not really his, as she gives herself away to Nick and Gatsby in different ways. Her voice is described to draw men in, that it is "...full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it...High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl..."; it tempts men into what they want most--it is the embodiment of the American Dream--and each man got a different part of the "American Dream": Gatsby received infinite hope, Nick was tempted, but was the one character who denied it, and Tom received reputation (Fitzgerald 120). By using her voice as a seduction tool among men, Fitzgerald is able to symbolize the seductive appeal of the American Dream that can never fully be reached. Almost every male character in the novel sought some sort of approval or love from Daisy, wanting to gain her to fill a part of their dream, but never fully gaining her love or attention; Nick, however, takes his eyes off her and by disowning her completely, is able to clearly see the rotten corruption in the American Dream, finding happiness in his situation that no other character finds. Fitzgerald, through the broken dreams and unattainable goals of his characters in the Great Gatsby, is able to convey that the American Dream is now a corrupt fantasy that is far out of reach and that happiness comes when one finds contentment in the honest life they live.

Quotation Analysis

"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dream--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. 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" (Fitzgerald 96).

After loosing Daisy to Tom, Gatsby spent his life trying to win her back in his delusions, building her and her love up in his mind for years with no reality to keep his expectations real along the way, resulting in an affair that started out as little more than a crush and some romance and ended up being a perfect relationship; or, at least, what he thought in the years that she was gone. Gatsby never stopped to get to know Daisy and see if and how she's changed over time, instead of assuming that she was stuck in the past like he was. He just assumed she would love him because everything he had he got for her, so how could she not be with his? He created this perfect image of her, though, one that came from his memories of the past and his imagination, continually adding more delightful perfections to his fanciful fabrication, "...adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way" (Fitzgerald 96). She continually disappointed him, not through any failure on her part, but only because of his standards of perfection were unattainable "...Daisy tumble[d] short of his dream--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion...It had gone beyond her" (Fitzgerald 96). Despite creating these impossible standards for her, he won't accept the truth that she is not everything that he imagines she is, everything that he has spent his entire, empty, life working towards, no matter how many times she made fall short of his standards; "No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart" (Fitzgerald 96).

"I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it 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 the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees" (Fitzgerald 161). 

In the last moments prior to his death, Gatsby realizes the life that he wasted on Daisy, that he "paid a high price for living too long with a single dream"; everything he did was for the singular goal of getting Daisy and now, with his life about to come to end, he finally sees the emptiness of his life when he focused everything on Daisy, that in his obsessive life style over her, he never accomplished anything; he never gained anything for himself because it was all for Daisy in a continual effort to impress her (Fitzgerald 161). Fitzgerald then continues to describe the new, terrifying, world, loveless and lacking that infinite hope he had always held onto, until now, when he realized that Daisy didn't love him; "[a] new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about..." (Fitzgerald 161). The world without his infinite hope and love for her suddenly seemed hideous; things that had once been beautiful in his eyes suddenly seemed repulsive and harsh, like "what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass"; he felt exposed now without Daisy dancing in front of his eyes, leading him down a one-way road, a road that only had room for her, but now that he is being "reborn" as himself--as James Gatz and Jay Gatsby, two poor boys finally merging into one renewed man, the yellow sunlight of the false life he had created began to quickly corrode his new person and he couldn't see how to fit back into his gaudy life comfortably anymore. Gatsby is described as a hopeless romantic of infinite hope in his love for Daisy, but here Fitzgerald shows how infinitely false his hope was in Daisy, allowing the reader to witness the shattering of Gatsby's infinite false hope and to experience the world without hope, how strangely twisted and cruel it can suddenly look after years of infinite beauty.

The American Dream through the Prohibition in the Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was based in the 1920's during the Prohibition, which Avey states "may well go down as one of the biggest legislative backfires in American history" (2). Instead of being a prosperous, simpler time for America, it became a business boom for the black market, putting the money that was so desired by entrepreneurs into the pockets of criminals, as described by Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, where Jay Gatsby makes his fortune from illegal bootlegging. Fitzgerald illustrates the corruption of society and the American Dream that occurs through the chaos of government prohibition, which Thornton states, "...it is no indictment against capitalism, as some may contend...It is rather an implicit condemnation of government prohibition....[where] [s]ocial order was replaced by chaos" (Thornton 1, 7). Government prohibition, where something is illegal, but not eliminated, builds the desire for it even more, in this case alcohol, and significantly increases its market, but not for legal companies, but illegal organized crime groups, which was how most of the "new money" West Eggers made their fortune, by illegally selling alcohol. Fitzgerald ties the social chaos into his image of the American Dream through the West Eggers, who tried to achieve the American Dream illegally and live up to the East Eggers, but somehow always manage to miss the mark, always below the East Eggers, who inherited their dream and wealth; for that reason, they would never reach the blissful American Dream that those in the East Egg represented, because the West Eggers went "...along a short-cut from nothing to nothing" (Fitzgerald 107). The West Eggers started off with nothing and despite their illegal work and false facades, still ended up with nothing, despite their new wealth and lifestyle, because, as Fitzgerald tries to illustrate, money cannot compensate for the empty stage behind the thick, mysterious curtain, nor outline the hazy shape of a man who has now been obliterated from existence through fabricated lies, fabulous facades, and complete and total denial of their past. Fitzgerald is demonstrating the broken American Dream that this twisted society has created through the Prohibition, one where people can short-cut through empty lives chasing everything they don't have--alcohol, wealth and for Gatsby, Daisy. And while the people can get their hands on alcohol, it's not by their own means, but by the means of someone else, a level of dependence that creates the desire in people to gain more for themselves; to have enough to support themselves and be on top, so they don't have to rely on others to get what they want, which is what keeps this broken dream going--the stubborn independence of people to have their own plentiful supply.
To Fitzgerald, government prohibitions were an evil that had the capability of rotting the most fundamental American values, such as the American Dream of hard work and prosperity, into a dream of short-cuts to wealth, power, and alcohol, which will never be worth the American Dream that is achieved through honest methods; his book is "...a testament to how twisted society can become, and how the Jay Gatsbys of the world can reach the stars, with the help of government prohibition" (Thornton 16).

Works Cited

Avey, Tori. "The Great Gatsby, Prohibition, and Fitzgerald." PBS. PBS, 14 May 2013. Web. 26 Apr. 2015.

Thornton, Mark. "Prohibition Caused the Greatness of Gatsby." Mises Institute. Mises Daily, 15 May 2013. Web. 26 Apr. 2015.