‘The Great Gatsby’ at 100

Novelists of our time, looking for subject matter, might train their sights on the legal, political, financial, and cultural structures that insulate a small number of the fortunate from the consequences of misdeeds. But anyone who sets out to write a book about it all will need to ask how the new work could in any way improve upon a novel published a hundred years ago, on April 10, 1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald bakes his concern with the perquisites of caste and wealth, and their real-world consequences, into the opening line in which the narrator, Nick Carraway, describes his fixation with the wisdom his father once dispensed to him. His father said that before criticizing others, he should remember that not everyone has had the same advantages in life that Nick has had. As Nick’s wistful, melancholy, darkly funny narrative unfolds, we come to see how lethal the resentments toward unjust social arrangements can be.

The protagonists of the novel—Jay Gatsby, an eccentric West Egg millionaire with multiple personal histories, all or none of which may be true; Tom Buchanan, a 30-year-old parvenu and bigot with the intellect and social graces of a 10-year-old; Daisy Buchanan, his outwardly insouciant, privately troubled wife; Jordan Baker, a girlhood friend of Daisy’s, who has complicated feeling toward Nick; and the narrator himself, a bond salesman, who is alternately lyrical and self-effacing as he relates the interactions of this rogue’s gallery—have all gotten to a high station in life.

They jaunt from Santa Barbara to Chicago to New York and flit between luxurious Manhattan digs and sprawling Long Island estates with park-sized gardens and views of the water. They throw lavish parties. None of them will ever have to worry about making rent, navigating credit card debt, building and retaining a network of at least superficial friendships, or other petty concerns that define life for so many.

Yet a fierce, irremediable malaise gnaws at the soul of every one of these people. Daisy’s social savoir faire and ebullience mask a discontent, which grows more acute as Tom’s nature comes out in scene after scene. She cheats on Tom, trysting with Gatsby, without quite bringing herself to declare that she never loved Tom. Behind Tom’s oafish front lurks insecurity, which drives him to question Gatsby’s bona fides as a member of the Long Island aristocracy so many people take him to be, and, in an unforgettable late scene, to attack Gatsby in the most savage, personal terms.

But Daisy is not the only adulterer. Tom’s fling with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a garage owner who chafes at the arrogance of the rich, will usher in tragedy when Gatsby, burning with thwarted desire for Daisy after that climactic argument and its words better left unsaid, mows down Myrtle in the street in an “accident.” This sets in motion an act of retribution with class overtones.

Insularity and privilege abound

Other passages bring home the insularity and privilege. When guests are leaving a bash at Gatsby’s estate, the crashing of a fancy new coupé in a ditch at the property’s outskirts plays, practically, as one more diversion for the guests. For some people, crashing a car would be a personal, financial, and legal catastrophe. Nick’s reflections on this and other incidents sum up the attitudes of the party-goers: “They were merely casual events in a crowded summer.”

Then there is the scene where Nick and Gatsby meet for lunch in “a well-fanned Forty-Second Street cellar” with Wolfshiem, the con artist who, Gatsby casually reveals, fixed the 1919 World Series. That someone could pull off a swindle of that magnitude and walk the streets freely speaks for itself. “Why isn’t he in jail?” Nick asks. Gatsby: “They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.” One could say the same about grifters of more recent times who orchestrated swindles with drastic consequences for the world’s financial markets. (One blemish on a near-flawless novel is that Nick’s description of Wolfshiem smacks faintly of anti-Semitic stereotypes.)

Fitzgerald’s point here is to ask how far society should allow the privileged  to go in their contempt for the rules and strictures by which ordinary people have to live. Up until the end of the novel, the wealthy get away with all manner of excess and amorality. To grasp what Fitzgerald is up to, it helps to examine a brief passage that some readers of The Great Gatsby might easily forget as the narrative carries them along. Jordan Baker, sharing her memories of the lavish wedding of Daisy and Tom in Louisville’s Seelbach Hotel years before, at which Jordan was a bridesmaid, recalls an odd, off-putting scene.

“I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey,” Jordan recalls. Treating herself to a bottle of Sauterne, Daisy indulges in a rare bit of honesty, asking Jordan to give away the $350,000 string of pearls that Tom has bestowed on her and to have the wedding called off because she has changed her mind. Daisy cries as Jordan and a maid help her into a cold bath.

The condescension of the elites toward ordinary people, which manifests itself in scene after scene in The Great Gatsby, hardly eases the resentment toward those who can act howsoever they please. In the scene where Tom, Nick, and Jordan pull in at George Wilson’s filling station, as the curious eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg look down from a huge billboard, it appears that Wilson’s hardships have made him physically sick: “With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and, breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his face was green.”

Wilson tells the rich people that he is desperate for money, that he and his wife have been stuck where they are for too long, and that they both “want to go West.” Given the meanings of “going West” in some cultures, it does not seem a stretch to consider Wilson to have expressed a semi-repressed death wish. When Tom offers to let Wilson have a car he wants, his noblesse oblige only further inflames the class rage. After the “accident” that kills Myrtle, Tom will use his influence with the police—as he did in an earlier scene, when threatened with a traffic ticket—to divert any suspicion away from himself. The coupé he was bringing over to Wilson’s garage was blue, the one involved in the accident was yellow and did not belong to Tom. Got it? Case closed.

For all their foibles, the reader does not want anything bad to happen to most of the characters here. Nick is the narrator, after all, and his sad and wistful voice endears him to the reader. Gatsby is charming and disarming, if pitiful, in his need for others to like and respect him. Daisy and Jordan are not hopelessly compromised by their faults.

But Wilson, the sick man whom the rich have treated with contempt, exacts vengeance on Gatsby, whose sparsely-attended funeral contrasts with the parties to which everyone who was anyone flocked. In Fitzgerald’s vision, the structures of caste, wealth, politics, and law that insulate the wealthy from the consequences of what they do in the world are not invisible to everyone, nor, it turns out, impregnable.

This dynamic is all around us in 2025. The rich and powerful continue to get away with things for which the poor burn. Yet the vision that Fitzgerald set forth in The Great Gatsby does not in any way excuse class-tinged savagery. It calls for a more mature understanding of the American Dream in which men and women will fully earn the perquisites that they enjoy from one day to the next, instead of using their status as a shield against the consequences of perfidy.