In the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the main protagonist Jay Gatsby is presented as being great in several senses, such as being a romantic, the way he is perceived, his potential, this greatness is only limited to an extent. This limitation of greatness is due to his pursuit of a distorted American Dream, and this is the central idea of the novel. For Gatsby, the American Dream is the love of Daisy Buchanan, a woman whom Gatsby has perceived with an idealistic image of the perfect trophy wife, an image which Daisy neither possesses nor deserves. In the novel, the greatness (and limitations of that greatness) of Gatsby is developed through how Fitzgerald comments on the American Dream, using the character of Gatsby to develop his core themes.

Arguably, the quality which makes Gatsby great is that he...