“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 4): In first third of novel, Gatsby illustrates kinds of lying and changes in demeanor seen in multiple personality.

The three prior posts (search “Fitzgerald”) discussed his novel, Tender is the Night, and this Fitzgerald quote: “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, the first-person narrator, comparing himself to other characters, says, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (1, p. 59). Since I have not yet finished the novel, I don’t know if Nick will turn out to be reliable, but other characters, such as Jay Gatsby, are certainly introduced as great liars.

Before Gatsby is introduced, the reader is told how all the people who attend his extravagant parties speculate about him—How did he get to be so rich? What is his background? Etc.—but nobody seems to know, and the rumors about him are inconsistent and contradictory. Has Gatsby kept his background secret? Or has he told different things to different people?

Gatsby says to Nick:

“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life…I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear…I’ll tell you God’s honest truth…I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West—all dead now…

“What part of the Middle West?” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

Gatsby goes on and on, saying things more and more extraordinary, until the narrator thinks, “My incredulity was submerged in fascination now…” (1, pp. 65-66).

The only thing I know for sure about what Gatsby says is that San Francisco is in California on the west coast, not in the Middle West. And the question is why Gatsby would say something so obviously untrue. This is not an ordinary lie.

Lying in Multiple Personality

Most people with multiple personality do not intentionally lie any more than the average person. But they may get a reputation as a liar 1) when they deny having done something that other people have seen them do, because the host personality has a memory gap for what an alternate personality did, or 2) when different personalities, who have different beliefs about what is true—and some personalities may have rather fanciful beliefs—tell fanciful or contradictory things to various people or to the same person at different times.

Search “lying” for previous discussions related to other writers.

Gatsby may have something to hide. Perhaps he got rich from crime. But only in the alternate reality of an alternate personality could San Francisco be in the Middle West.

Abrupt Change in Demeanor

“He [Gatsby] smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life…It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck…” (1, p. 48).

Now, it is true that when the above was going on, “a butler had hurried toward him [Gatsby] with the information that Chicago was calling.” And perhaps Gatsby had criminal connections in Chicago, which might explain his switch from empathic to roughneck. But the above passage does not portray him as a hypocrite, who is only pretending to be extraordinarily empathic, but who is really a roughneck. No, he appears to be genuinely both: first one, then the other, switching suddenly from one to the other, like a person with multiple personality.

Perhaps, you may think, the above is not an example of multiple personality, but of a con man. But what makes a good con man? Search “confidence man” in this blog for a discussion of multiple personality in two novels with “confidence man” in their titles.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.