Examples Of Ambiguity In The Great Gatsby

The Ambiguity of the Great Gatsby Throughout the history of film, people have liked to root for the good guy and wish that the bad guy gets defeated. Good vs. evil has taken many forms over the years: Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, Superman and Lex Luthor, Mark Wahlberg and trees. However, many of the best characters have been of the morally ambiguous sort. There are many great examples of morally ambiguous characters, from Walter White to Han Solo. However, moral ambiguity has been a literary fixture longer than it has been a cinematic one. F. Scott Fitzgerald plays with moral ambiguity in his novel The Great Gatsby by writing multiple characters that the reader cannot determine if these characters can be considered good or bad. One of these

Gatsby constantly refers to other people as “old sport” and has a cheerful attitude towards everyone he meets. When he first meets Gatsby at the first party Nick goes to, Nick makes observations about Gatsby:

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. It faced-- or seemed to face-- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so 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.

At the first party Nick goes to, one of the girls he meets says a rumor about Gatsby: “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once” (48). This immediately brings into question the kind of man Gatsby is. Even though this is a rumor, the fact that it has been spread around shows how these people, most of whom don’t know Gatsby personally, don’t view him as the perfect man that Nick does. Rather, they view him as a mysterious enigma of a man with a cloudy past with potentially morally wrong actions. These judgemental guests even go as far as to question his loyalty to America by claiming he was a German spy during the war. All these claims and rumors and gossip show how people can tell something is up with where Gatsby is on the good and bad spectrum. Nobody is really sure about Gatsby’s background, which makes him morally ambiguous by the fact that his true self is distorted by these rumors and gossip. When Tom and Gatsby argue in the apartment over Daisy, Tom brings up how Gatsby has a shadier side that Nick hadn’t realized: “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him and I wasn’t far wrong” (141). This revelation that Gatsby is a bootlegger, which had