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I.
In a novel in which language is consistently seen to work against the demands of veracity, at least one formulation in The Great Gatsby rings true: Nick Carraway's pronouncement, near the start of the novel, that "Gatsby turned out all right at the end" (Fitzgerald 1999, 6). Jay Gatsby, a figure marked by failure and shadowed by death throughout most of the novel, nevertheless achieves a form of "greatness" in the final paragraphs of his story; it is at this point, in the words of Lionel Trilling, that Gatsby "comes inevitably to stand for America itself" (1963, 17). For it is in the final, lyrical paragraphs of the novel that Gatsby's fate takes on mythic dimensions, becoming an allegory for the course of the American nation and for the struggles and dreams of its citizens.This transformation occurs when the novel's narrator, Nick Carraway, finally perceives what lies beneath the "inessential" surface world of his surroundings: a vital impulse, an originary American hope. Nick sees Gatsby as the incarnation of this national impulse, this "extraordinary gift for hope," using the same term-"wonder"-to describe Gatsby's desire for Daisy Buchanan and that of the first American colonists gazing at "the fresh green breast of the new world." For Nick, Gatsby's lies, his pretensions, and his corruption are "no matter"; nor is his failure to win back Daisy; what matters is the sustaining belief in the value of striving for a "wondrous" object, not its inevitable disappearance and meaninglessness. And in a significant shift in pronouns of the novel's final sentences, Nick unites Gatsby's effort with a general, if unspecified, national collective: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-. . . So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (Fitzgerald 1999, 141; my emphasis). What matters to Gatsby is what matters to "us"; Gatsby's story is "our" story; his fate and the fate of the nation are intertwined. That Gatsby "turned out all right in the end" is thus essential to the novel's vision of a transcendent and collective Americanism.
Yet this ending is in fact at odds with the characterization of Gatsby in the...