Jay Gatsby’s Great Loneliness
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel is about wealth, social class, and fantasy. It’s also a subtle depiction of loneliness.
The Great Gatsby is one of those great works of literature that people are always reading, so much so that people write essays about why people are always reading it. Fitzgerald’s novel is about many things, such as wealth, social class, and fantasy — “illusions and delusions”, as Wesley Morris describes it in the aforementioned essay. Those themes are close to the surface and oft-discussed, but reading The Great Gatsby in 2021 (for the first time), loneliness is the theme that stands out the most.
At the story’s end, protagonist and narrator Nick Carraway has met Jay Gatsby, the mythic millionaire who lived in the mansion next door, and is left with the task of arranging Gatsby’s funeral. Gatsby was known for throwing elaborate parties that filled his mansion with a great amount of people, so one may guess that his funeral would also be a party itself, but that’s not the case.
Calling up Gatsby’s chums, Nick struggles to get anybody to attend Gatsby’s funeral. They came for the party, the food, the fun, but shed themselves of any associations with him due to the vague details of his murder. “After that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby —…
