In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald discusses Jay Gatsby.
Jay Gatsby's success can only be described; it seems, through a series of ethnic and racial analogies. Goldsmith says “In the bewildered eyes of Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby could have sprung more easily from ‘the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York’ than alighted fully formed on the shore of Long Island Sound with no family, history, or origins” (Goldsmith, Meredith). According to Goldsmith, “Later in The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan engages in the same comparative logic, characterizing Gatsby's wooing of Daisy as tantamount to ‘intermarriage between black and white’ (137)” (Goldsmith, Meredith). For both Tom and Nick, racial miscegenation and immigrant ethnic assimilation
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Framing the revelation of Gatsby's past with African-American and ethnic comparisons, F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals a lacuna in the narration of white, working-class masculinity.white, working-class origins, the success of his scandalous behavior resides in his imitation of African-American and ethnic modes of self-definition. In this essay, I argue that Gatsby's mode of self-invention may be fruitfully read against those of the protagonists of Harlem Renaissance and Americanization fiction of the late teens and twenties. In the works of African-American novelists such as James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Nella Larsen and such Jewish-American writers as Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Mary Antin, racial and national identities become objects of imitation, appropriated by parvenu protagonists through the apparatus of speech, costume, and manners. I should make clear that it is not my intention to subsume the differences between the narrative strategies or political contexts of these two genres. While the protagonists of passing narratives usually succeed by concealing the past, often at the risk of violent retribution, the telos of the immigrant narrative typically demonstrates an ambivalent