Divinity In The Great Gatsby

Have you ever admired anyone in your life to the point that this person seems like he or she is more than human or divine? In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby, the main character, Nick, introduces Jay Gatsby as a divine being, even though he does not really know much about him at this point. Nick only knows of a man that discreetly watches him from his bedroom in his mansion. As the story progresses, a series of events that occur guide Nick to find out the truth about Gatsby. Throughout the story, Nick’s view of Gatsby clearly changes from Gatsby acquiring traits of divinity to just being a human being. Nick portrays Gatsby as a figure of divinity because Nick does not know Gatsby’s hidden truths, but as Nick begins to learn the truth,

When Nick first meets Gatsby, he saw Gatsby smile for the first time and felt reassured. Nick similarly argues, “He smiled understandingly- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life” (48). Nick is insisting that Gatsby’s smile describes his personality and that it is very rare. Nick believes that Gatsby’s smile is so special because he does not know anything about Gatsby. Due to the fact that Nick does not know Gatsby’s secrets, Gatsby appears to Nick as a divine figure. Fitzgerald’s use of the word “eternal” indicates Gatsby’s smile as an angelic feature because divine beings live forever. In addition, when Nick first mentions Gatsby at the beginning of the story, he claims that Gatsby is the only person that is exempt from his judgement because of Gatsby’s angelic characteristics. Nick enlightens matters further when he claims that, “only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” (2). Nick’s point is that

A lot of times, people only look at the good features of their role models and neglect the negative aspects of them just as Nick did with Gatsby. There comes a point in time that the person begins to examine their role model as a whole and look at both good and bad. This is what makes us human because everyone has their positives and negatives. Although Nick’s perspective of Gatsby in the beginning was as a God, he learned more about Gatsby and concluded that he is just a regular person just like