In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald cultivates a tension between an individual’s authenticity, the perception they project and the perception floated by others via rumor and gossip. No means of deriving the truth about someone is presented as any more reliable, all convey elements of truth and falsehood. Gatsby projects an image of himself that appears entirely constructed, but as Nick finds out, the construct itself and the motivation behind it reveal a lot about the authentic Jay Gatsby.
Early in the story, characters discover truth and authenticity by believing what they “heard.” When Nick goes to visit his cousin Daisy, she tells him, “We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.” Nick quashes the rumor, but Daisy persists. “But we heard it….We heard it from three people so it must be true.”
In his thoughts, Nick sarcastically equates these rumors with an official notice of engagement, but maintains he won’t be “rumored into marriage.” It’s an acknowledgement of the power of rumor and public perception to make things true that have virtually no basis in reality. Gatsby himself wields this power to mesmerize and enchant Long Island society folk while trying to capture the object of his desire, Daisy.
Nick gets an earful of things heard from his hosts, Daisy and Tom, who lay bare the dysfunction present in their lives. First Daisy fills him in on the “family secret” concerning the butler’s nose. Then Nick is thrown off guard by Jordan’s prying into the secrets of Tom and Daisy’s marriage. While Tom can be heard inside the house taking a call from his mistress, Jordan eavesdrops, leaning “forward, unashamed, trying to hear….’Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens,’” she says. The whole scene culminates in an anxious and uncomfortable moment when the truth of what is known, the illusion of what is portrayed, and the confusion of rumor become entangled and loom over the party like a neurotic gloom.
Regarding his meeting Jordan, Nick remembers he “had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.” This unpleasant story will shape the way Nick thinks of Jordan for the rest of their time together, preventing him from committing to her, even as he appears to fall for her.
In the next chapter, Tom invites Nick along to partake in his secret life, treating Nick’s inclusion like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and rendering the whole charade with Daisy and Jordan a mere fact of married life. Like Gatsby, Tom maintains his own outward illusion, exhibiting a life of wealth, privilege and domesticity while concealing a tawdry affair with the mechanic’s wife and slumming it with her friends in the city.
Then there are the things people have heard about Gatsby, that he is a bootlegger and that he had once killed a man. It becomes clear to Nick that among the elites of Long Island it is assumed that the image one puts forward is a false representation, and the real truth can be found in the rumors whispered at parties or laid out in scandal rags. Few people are who they seem and Gatsby represents the biggest mystery of them all. At some level, it is assumed by the inhabitants of this world that wealth can buy virtue, so the virtue put on display must constitute a fiction. Gatsby represents a new force emerging in this society that holds a mirror up to the false virtue of the old world money elite and exposes it as a fiction. His background as an outsider and an interloper reveals that all these old world social customs are just a pretense, a posturing the old money elites engage in to claim moral superiority over those who represent a threat to their status.
If there is something 