Jay Gatsby's Smile

“He 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 faced- or seemed to face- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself” (Fitzgerald, 48).

In Chapter three, Nick has his first close examination of Jay Gatsby’s character and physical appearance; this passage is his initial reaction. Nick’s description of Gatsby’s smile is able to represent both the dramatic and charismatic side of his character. Not only does Nick have this as his initial impression of Gatsby, but the rest of the characters in the story do too. The way he is represented by Nick at their first encounter is the same way Gatsby appears to the rest of the world and all the guests at his parties that do not know him. The author begins to decompose the persona of this character as the novel develops and Gatsby’s death approaches. One of the central façades of Gatsby’s image is that he acts out a role that he defined for himself when he was seventeen years old. This is also associated to the last paragraph of the novel, where it is understood that Gatsby went against the current of reality because he was in love with the woman he thought Daisy was. He remembered things the way he wanted to remember them, and all he wanted to do was go back to the way he thought things were. Gatsby’s smile seems be a significant part of his character. Here, Nick describes Gatsby’s smile as having the ability to make anyone he smiles at feel as though they have been exclusively selected out of “the whole external world,” (Fitzgerald, 48) producing that person’s most hopeful and positive thought of themselves.