Long heralded as Fitzgerald’s finest work, The Great Gatsby is a tale of the American Dream that deals with themes of excess, resistance to change, and racial ambiguity. Very early on in the novel it is understood that race, as well as violence, honesty, and misogyny, play a very large role in how the characters view each other, outsiders, and how they all interact. Around the time that Gatsby was written, racism in the early 1900’s continued to thrive with whites dominating and believing they were superior over the colored races. This belief becomes a central idea and motivation among the characters in the novel, specifically Tom, Nick and Gatsby, and highlights a general fear of challenged white supremacy, a rising and falling of the “other” …show more content…
Earlier in the novel, Nick notes in shock as a white chauffeur drives “three modish negroes” across the Queensborough bridge and reflects that anything can happen including this and even Gatsby (69). The fact that Nick is surprised that the chauffeur is white and the Negroes are fashionable and modern suggests that Nick has, like many others, fallen into the belief that these things were not possible and a little uncomfortable in their white society. Another example is Nick’s obsession with Meyer Wolfsheim’s nose and how it seems to come alive all its own because of Nick’s persistent focus on it. He states: “A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril” (69). This obsession may not totally be surrounding Wolfsheim’s Jewish background, but more simply that the growths of hair were hilariously …show more content…
Nick’s exchange with Jordan at one of Gatsby’s parties reveal this concern, which vibrates throughout the text: “‘Who is he?’ I demanded. ‘Do you know?’ ‘He’s just a man named Gatsby.’ ‘Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?’ ‘Now you’re started on the subject’” (48-49). Schreier’s essay quotes critic Walter Benn Michaels’s observations on Gatsby’s questionable background: Gatsby’s real problem, in Michaels’s account, is that he is “without a past”: he does not have an acceptable pedigree, and winning Daisy (in the nativist imaginary) requires that he have one. Only rewriting the (racialized) past – precisely what Gatsby cannot do through (economically) transformative agency – could “retroactively make him someone who could be ‘married’ to Daisy.” (qtd. in Schreier 156) According to Michaels and Schreier, without a “reputable” past, Gatsby’s ambiguous origins mar him from having any sort of success with Daisy. He is considered an enigma among his neighbors and a threat to the establishment of “old money” and traditional