The Great Gatsby is about Jay Gatsby's love for Daisy Buchanan

The argument

Jay Gatsby's dream to be with Daisy Buchanan is the entire driving force of the novel, and the reading that follows treats every other element of the book as instrumental to it. His wealth is not an ambition in its own right but what he believes will make him eligible. The move to New York is not a career decision but a matter of proximity. The parties are not entertainment but an elaborate lure, thrown in hopes that she will attend one of them. Read this way, the spectacle the novel is famous for exists entirely in the service of a single private purpose. The love also organises the other characters, not Gatsby alone. The Great Gatsby completely revolves around love, and it is the motivation behind many characters' actions rather than his only: even Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker help with the pursuit of Daisy by being Gatsby's wingman, rather than pursuing ends of their own. What the novel presents as a social world turns out, when traced back, to be a set of people arranged around one man's attachment. The ending is where the reading is confirmed. Gatsby's entire life is centered on loving and pleasing Daisy and is the cause for every action, including the last one. He loved Daisy so greatly that he took the blame from her, and taking the blame is what gets him killed. That is the strongest evidence the text offers, because it is the point at which the love stops serving his interests and costs him everything, which rules out reading his pursuit of her as really an appetite for status or self-invention. On this account the novel is about love, and Gatsby's love for Daisy is its subject.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The Great Gatsby isn't just about love. There are other themes as well, such as wealth, the American dream, and social status. Gatsby's love for Daisy may be important to the plot, but there are other situations occurring simultaneously. The novel also goes into detail about other characters' lives, such as Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] What drives Gatsby is arguably not Daisy but what she represents. The novel presents her as inseparable from the wealth and social position he pursues, and his attachment is to a version of her fixed five years earlier — which reads as much as a story about aspiration and the past as about love. [Rejecting P2] The claim that other characters' actions revolve around this love is selective. Nick's role is that of an observer whose own arc concerns disillusionment with the East, and Jordan, Tom, Myrtle and George have plotlines the premise does not account for. [Rejecting P3] Gatsby taking the blame establishes devotion, not that devotion is the book's subject. The counter-argument on record makes the general point: love is important to the plot without being the theme, and the novel develops wealth, class and the American dream at equal length alongside it. [Rejecting C] Identifying the engine of a plot is not the same as identifying a theme, so the premises do not show that The Great Gatsby is about love rather than about what Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy signifies.