What are the themes of The Great Gatsby?

The Great Gatsby is about Nick Carraway exploring his sexuality

Question: What are the themes of The Great Gatsby?
Position‹3 of 5›: The Great Gatsby is about love
Argument1 of 2›: The Great Gatsby is about Nick Carraway exploring his sexuality

Throughout the novel, Nick was involved in suggestive scenes with both men and women but did not have a lasting romantic relationship with anyone. This serves as a nod to his journey in exploring his sexuality.

The argument

This reading takes Nick Carraway's own emotional life, rather than the romance he narrates, as the centre of the novel, and finds in it a struggle he never states directly. The first piece of evidence is his relationship with Jordan Baker. In The Great Gatsby, Nick struggles with building that relationship: he is consistently nervous and uncomfortable in her presence and often does not know what to say. For a narrator who is fluent and observant about everyone else's entanglements, the awkwardness stands out, and this reading takes it as a sign that the difficulty lies in the nature of the attachment rather than in any general shyness on Nick's part. The second piece is a scene the novel declines to narrate. While at a party in New York City, Nick goes off with Mr. McKee, the two eventually ending up in his bedroom. The prose breaks off at the crucial point and readers are left to infer on their own, but on this reading it is obvious that a sexual encounter takes place between the two men. The ellipsis is treated as deliberate rather than accidental: a narrator who reports everything else in detail becomes suddenly reticent about the one episode that concerns himself. Put together, the two establish a pattern running the length of the book. Readers are able to see Nick struggle with his sexuality throughout the entire novel, and the case rests on the combination rather than on either episode alone, since the awkward relationship with Jordan Baker supplies the unease while the scene in Mr. McKee's bedroom supplies what the unease is about. On this reading the novel's treatment of love is not confined to the courtship it describes openly, but includes the narrator's own unresolved relationship to desire, which he can describe in others and not in himself.

Premises

[P1]Throughout the novel Nick Carraway is awkward and uncomfortable in his relationship with Jordan Baker. [P2] The scene in which he leaves with Mr McKee and ends up in his bedroom strongly implies a sexual encounter between the two men. [P3] These episodes together show Nick wrestling with his own sexuality across the narrative. [C] Therefore, through Nick's exploration of his sexuality, The Great Gatsby is about love.

Counter-arguments

There is no concrete proof that Nick Carraway is struggling with his sexuality. His relationship with Jordan Baker ended due to how shy and quiet he is. In the scene with Mr. McKee, he never explicitly states what happens, so readers cannot draw conclusions.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Nick Carraway is not nervous around his cousin, Daisy Buchanan.