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The biggest question of any Great Gatsby characters analysis is which character impersonates the author himself? Is it Nick Carraway or the legendary Mr. Gatsby himself? Let’s try to find out.
Nick Carraway
Nick Carraway is the narrator of the book. Unlike Jay Gatsby, he is from the “old rich” – he inherited his money from the family of hardware business owners and is constantly surprised by the lifestyle of the “new rich”. The money his family provided him with was enough to live a decent, but not a very posh life: his house was one of the smallest in the West Egg.
He is well-educated and has a well-rounded personality overall. He didn’t exhibit any desires to show off or prove to others that he is rich and successful. Nevertheless, he had very high standards both to his living conditions and people around him.
He likes literature and went to war. Quite a strange combination, but those were the attributes of a proper man of that time. At the same time, he can’t restrain from judging the people he meets.
At the end of the book, Nick is disgusted with the lifestyle he has experienced in New York and heads back to his home. He is mostly disgusted with what he became under the influence of the people he met. He realizes that his aspirations are corrupted by money and lies and that the American dream is over.
Jay Gatsby
Though Gatsby’s name is in the title of the book, the character is actually pretty simple. Jay Gatsby started as Jimmy Gatz, a young boy from a farmer’s family ashamed of his origins, but he had a dream: to escape his position and become rich and famous. His father saw the boy’s tendency to develop and move forward fast and helped him change the course of his life.
The reader meets the protagonist already as Jay Gatsby, who is living in an extravagant house next to Nick Carraway and is constantly throwing loud parties for hundreds of people. He might have made his money illegally, but neither the author nor society seems to care.
Jimmy Gatz made his fortune once he met Dan Coddy and worked on his boat for 5 years. The millionaire left him 25,000 dollars after his death, but he never received the money. He used his experience to make his dreams come true, but are his dreams really worthy of him?
Daisy Buchanan
Even though Gatsby had met many women in his life, Daisy was the first lady from the upper society that he met and fell in love with. He had been to her home many times, together with other officers. He liked the beautiful house and liked her company but knew that he didn’t deserve it at the time.
When they parted, he went to stock his pockets with money and positions while she hid behind her rich house, in her expensive and life full of perspectives. But the weird feeling that they were meant to be a husband and wife remained.
In her letters, Daisy was impatient and bored. She was young and wanted to live her life in the here and now, and to live it well. She was ready to make a decision but needed an incentive: love, money, benefit, fame, anything. That’s where Tom appeared which helped made her decision easy. They had a daughter whom Daisy never discussed during the whole book.
At the very end, she lets the man she loves take the blame for her crime. She then runs away with her cheating husband, leaving everything behind for the sake of tranquility. Despite some incidental events, her life was easy, careless, and shallow. Tom Buchanan is a commanding and forceful character. He is rich and arrogant.
He likes sports, pays great attention to his looks, and is very possessive. He cheats openly on his wife with Myrtle Wilson, but becomes very annoyed when he finds out about her fling. He is willing to do whatever it takes to break Daisy and Jay’s affair not for the sake of love, but for the sake of self-esteem. In the end, he doesn’t seem to care about the crime his wife committed, but cold-heartedly takes advantage of the opportunity to destroy his opponent.
Jordan Baker is a careless traveler of the years of her life. From the young age, just like Mayer Wolfsheim, she got used to silly actions and was even planning to make a fortune by cheating golf players.
She has very good instincts and manages to avoid smart and clear-sighted people. She feels confident among those who can’t even conjure a thought that she might be dishonest. Just like in the case of Buchanan, she is used to getting away with all her small crimes, even though they were frequent.
Meyer Wolfsheim is a real predator of the book. He is making a fortune by inventing different affairs. He plays the “too rich to fail” card cheating on 50 million baseball fans and getting away with it. He helped get Gatsby out of poverty, but only because he saw the benefit in it for himself.
With Mayer Wolfsheim, the author demonstrates the gradation between the rich of that time. Despite wealth, Wolfsheim didn’t make it to the true upper class but was still a desired guest for many companies.
