What's So Great About Gatsby? The Titular Irony of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"

The Great Gatsby is a novel of skeletons in closets.  All of the characters have a past, and while we are not always privy to the specificities of these haunting secrets, we see their manifest effects on the present throughout the novel.  Battling against the looming pressure of past lives is the universal belief in the possibility of change that all of Fitzgerald's characters cling to.  For Gatsby in particular, the desire to transcend his origins and escape memory allows him to create projections of idealism that he believes are love and authenticity.  That is to say, Gatsby, in his desire for reinvention, confuses the idealization of wealth, power, and Daisy Buchanan with genuine love and inclusion in a way that leads to his ultimate loss of self both physically and metaphysically at the end of the novel.

Throughout the novel, Gatsby, in his luxurious mansion, throws elaborate and expensive parties fraught with all facets of 1920s hedonism and elitist escapism.  His guests clamor to know the elusive Gatsby who, in his fabulous displays of material excess, becomes a sort of god of nightlife and glamour.  Yet as Gatsby's past begins to emerge at the end of the novel, his popularity disappears along with his guests who we realize were never really Gatsby's friends in the first place.  In Gatsby's ultimate solitude and relative anonymity at the end of the novel, Fitzgerald posits a very clear binary between being noticed versus being known.  And beyond that, being known versus being loved.  The world of Gatsby was one of fetish and fantasy, and in his ultimate downfall, it is clear that he had confused signifiers of wealth and affection, as well as the means to an end, with real love.  When Gatsby finally realizes that Daisy is as superficial and protected as he had been trying to be, we readers are forced to see that, in the metaphysics of the novel, self knowledge is ultimately impossible.  After all of his lavish parties, his countless colored shirts, his beautiful rooms, and his fatally fast cars, Gatsby is left vacant and anonymous to the world he had so desperately tried to (and almost succeeded at) being a part of.  In the end, we see that Gatsby was never really great at all.  He was a human who, like the rest of us, just wanted to be loved in a way that was genuine amidst superficial and imageaic constructions of wealth, selfishness, and dishonesty.