How Great Is The Great Gatsby Really Great

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald follows the story of Gatsby, a man whose desire to be one of the elite led him to acquire a great deal of money to create an idealistic dream life for himself of loving Daisy in a perfect world. Author might have written the title "great" ironically, meanwhile Gatsby is still great personally in many ways and much better than the society he lived in. Gatsby is one of the wealthiest people in West Egg and any of his parties would qualify as a legendary event. Ordinary rich people can not throw such amazing parties. He is a local celebrity and anyone has their own theory how he got rich. Everyone is interested in his life and talks about him. He lives in a dream. In that way, he is “great”. That is what Gatsby wanted. As Nick describes, he had thrown the biggest parties to be noticed by Daisy. He invented an ideal of himself. He wanted to be successful and he achieved it. Jay became one of the most powerful men in the area.
His dream-like life is fake. Jay Gatsby becomes high-class society “member” in a dishonest way. He has earned and got wealthy by doing illegal activities. The people who belongs to “old money” see right through his appearance. He is not “great” to them - he is not genuine. Owl-eyed man compares Gatsby's mansion to a house of cards, saying "that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse" and when his house of cards collapse, all those friends of his, turn out to simply be people who take advantage of his generosity and riches. This sentence can be affirmed by the fact that no one showed up at his funeral, except his father, Nick, and owl-eyed man who mentioned that “they used to go there by the hundreds”