Passing and The Great Gatsby

Larsen is clear about what passing means to her as she writes about Clare,

She wished to find out about this hazardous business of "passing," this breaking way from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly (Larsen 157).

Clare thinks about the issue of passing. If Gatsby does so, we are not privileged to share in those thoughts, for while he is the subject of The Great Gatsby, he is not the central consciousness of the novel. The character of Jay Gatsby is used by the author to comment on the falseness of the accepted and even elevated aspect of the society in which he lives. Gatsby does not see the falseness of this social milieu and aspires to be part

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nd reach out to what is unknown and different. Gatsby is seen in his novel very much through the eyes of others, who speculate about him even as they also tend to pigeonhole him as someone who is not really part of their class. They see him as passing in the sense that they believe he is trying to reach out of his own proper class to become part of theirs. One such character is that of Jordan Baker, who serves several purposes in the course of the story. She is the means by which Nick Carraway is brought into the group that becomes so important to him and that he as an outsider can understand better than they do themselves. Her presence illustrates the problem of honesty and its importance in human relations. Her relationship with Nick parallels the relationship of Gatsby and Daisy to a degree, and the different outcomes serve to illuminate the foolishness of Gatsby's devotion to Daisy while offering a more realistic and rational example of how human beings should relate to one another. Gatsby is very much a man of his age. He has been a bootlegger in the era of Prohibition, and the people of West Egg, while they may look down on the lowly bootlegger in the social structure, also would avail themselves of his services. T
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1337
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)