In The Great Gatsby Scott Fitzgerald presents a study of wealth and ambition through the prism of pathetic characters for which one can find almost no socially redeeming values.

What novel portrays is the sordid story of small band of feeble characters engaged in cheating, adultery, deception, and debauchery. The lavish parties --Jazz-age style-- that Jay Gatsby throws to recover Daisy Buchanan (his lost illusions and perfidious lover) are all but wild bacchanalians.

When one thinks about of the rest of the nation, we can breathe a sigh of relief to see that the rest of Americans are engaged in productive enterprise, in rebuilding the nation after the waste of resources that was the First World War. The sordidness of the story applies, almost in its entirety, to that small band of marginal, misguided, and unsavory characters. It isn't a book about the spiritual dismemberment of America (as many have interpreted the book to be) that came in 1927 with the Great Depression.

Nick Carraway: Unreliable Narrator

While in Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Killers" we experience the objective voice of a disinterested narrator, in The Great Gatsby we are deceived by the relentless biases of Nick Carraway, a likable character --and narrator-- who not only has an interesting story to tell, but also has an agenda. His agenda is a laundry list of things "to clean up," events to smooth over, and a guilty consciousness to cleanse. In a similar vein as the Confessions penned by Augustine, Rousseau, and Ben Franklin, Nick exacerbates other people's crimes and misdemeanors while obscuring and diminishing his own.

From the outset of the narration, Nick Carraway makes it clear that the story he's about to tell is a very personal story, and that he is going to be a protagonist. So, with these words: "In my younger and more vulnerable years..." he begins to tell the story about himself and about young people coming of age, people who at present are in the midst of finding their own identity, groping for goals and a more certain future. It is a generational story in which ambitious Dough Boys --having returned from fighting a world war-- vie for position under the sun, vying for a spot not in the tedium of poverty or disenchantment, but for a share of splendor in wealth and love.

Although Nick makes the calculated decision to come East to pursue a career in Wall Street, his heart moves him in a different direction; his heart is in literature, and he lets us know what his intentions are: "I was rather literary in college-one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News-and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well rounded man.'" (GG, 4).

Having attended Yale University, he is justified in calling himself a 'well rounded man' who is fully equipped by experience, education, and talent to become a writer, a literary man.

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