Why The Great Gatsby may be the world’s most misunderstood novel

Few characters from books capture an era as firmly as Jay Gatsby captures the Jazz Age. A century after F Scott Fitzgerald wrote him into being, Gatsby has become a kind of brand. His name now sells hotels, sofas, hair products and even sandwiches. People who have never read the novel still feel that they know him, partly because Hollywood has filmed his story so many times. Yet the figure on the screen and the figure on the page are not always the same person.

Misunderstanding has followed The Great Gatsby from the start. When the book was published in 1925, Fitzgerald complained to a friend that no reviewer had any idea what it was really about. Sales were modest, and by the time he died in 1940, most copies sat unsold. The novel only took off after World War Two, when the US military gave away thousands of free copies to soldiers. By the 1960s it was being taught in schools, and pop culture turned it into a symbol of glamour and wild parties.

That image, however, hides what the novel is doing. The story is told by Nick Carraway, a first-person narrator who reports events using “I”. The novelist Michael Farris Smith, whose recent book Nick gives Carraway his own backstory, suggests that readers often pass over this voice too quickly. In Smith’s version, Nick has fought in the trenches of World War One and has come home with what we would now call PTSD. Trench warfare is therefore not a small detail. It may explain why Nick watches the parties so coldly and why he describes Gatsby with both admiration and quiet criticism.

William Cain, a professor at Wellesley College, agrees that Nick is the key to the book. He warns against treating the novel only as a stage for big ideas. Yes, Gatsby raises the question of the American Dream, but Fitzgerald shows that the dream is far easier to chase than to reach. Class lines, Cain argues, are stricter than money can fix. Many of his students now feel a kind of sadness about the dream, partly because of widening inequality. To read the novel well, he says, we need to slow down and look closely at how Fitzgerald actually writes, sentence by sentence.

Some parts of the novel have not aged well. Fitzgerald clearly disliked the white supremacist views of Tom Buchanan, yet the book still uses ugly language about African Americans. The female characters, too, feel thin: they are mainly seen through the eyes of men who want them. Recent writers have responded with new versions. One novel flips the roles so that Jay Gatsby is a woman; another invents a younger sister called Greta Gatsby and turns the story into a murder mystery.

Why does the book still matter? One reason is that it changes with us. Pick it up at fifteen, and it can feel like a glamorous love story. Pick it up at thirty, and it may read as a warning about hope and self-deception. Read it again later, and the small details of class and loss come forward. As Smith puts it, great novels keep evolving in our heads because we ourselves keep changing. The parties may be the surface, but the deeper question, what we want and what it costs, is what keeps Gatsby alive.