Augustine, Nick
Bell
AP Literature
12 August 2014

There are the good, the bad, and then, the neutral. Some characters are neither good nor bad, such as Jay Gatsby in the The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby is a memoir to Jay, written by his best friend Nick. It focusses on Jays obsession with a Daisy, a girl from his past who he chases after, until he give his life for her. Jay got money illegally to become rich, but what he does for others makes us see him as not a good person, but an ambiguous one.
Jay may have bootlegged to get into the West Egg, but his morals are good, and pure. Jays reasoning for bootlegging to get money to get Daisy back, while this is viewed as bad this was certainly not an evil thing to do, and was quite a common practice in Prohibition times. This does not excuse these actions, but what counterbalances the bootlegging is his morals, and what does for others. Jay has pure morals, and while he may have gotten to where he is through shady methods, he helps those he cares about in any way he can. Jay would give up his life for his friends, and did. He may have done bad things to get where he was, but his morals, and what he did for his friends makes him morally ambiguous. Gatsby reveals himself to be an innocent, hopeful young man who stakes everything on his dreams, not realizing that his dreams are unworthy of him. Gatsby invests Daisy with an idealistic perfection that she cannot possibly attain in reality and