Character

Abstract

Critics have tended to accept that The Great Gatsby is very much a novel about character conflict, and that the novel’s themes are to a large degree expressed through the characters. That is, the characters could be said to have symbolic or representative roles. One of the technical advances made by Fitzgerald from his earlier novels was in using a limited number of characters. There are only five characters (Gatsby, Nick, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker) who could be considered major. Myrtle Wilson and George Wilson have comparatively minor roles, and there are several more minor characters who play a significant part but who are sketched rather than characterized. These include Wolfsheim, Michaelis, the owl-eyed man, Klipspringer, and Henry Gatz. The success of The Great Gatsby has depended very much on the quality of Fitzgerald’s characterization, and also on the use of the minor figures. In a celebrated book on the genre of the novel, E.M. Forster made a distinction between the more complex characters represented by an author, and the more accessible, ‘surface’ characters. He called the former ‘round’ characters, and the latter, ‘flat’, demonstrating that flat characters play an important part in the movement of the narrative (Forster, 1927, pp. 73–84).