Intentions: Friend or Faux

By Sam Gumprecht

There are always two parts to a story, the motives or intentions and the actions that follow suit. In the novel The Great Gatsby the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, compares the effects of intentions to the outcome, in multiple situations. Intentions can mean the difference to whether a criminal receives fourteen years or a minimum of twenty-five years in prison. They can also be the deciding factor of war or terrorism. It depends on if someone was fighting for a cause with a country or against a country. Corruption of bonds, illegal sale of liquor and allegiances with mobs, all sound like someone who deserves to be in jail. Yet Jay Gatsby, the man so belovedly dear to american literature, isn’t soiled by these acts, he is seen as good. He is painted in a positive light because of his intentions. Intentions determine the outcome of many situations, and they determined the greatness of Gatsby.

The young, beautiful kryptonite of the main character, Daisy Buchanan, is the apple of Gatsby’s eye. Daisy could do no wrong in the eyes of Gatsby even if it came to killing someone. On the way home from a day out in the city, Daisy was driving Gatsby’s shining yellow car. As she drove past the unassuming shop of the Wilsons, she slammed into Myrtle the mistress of her husband. So why were there no handcuffs and jail for Daisy? Because Gatsby takes the fall for her. Other than being madly in love with her, why would Gatsby blindly take the fall even though he witnessed the crime? Her intentions is why; they were not that of murder. She had no plans of hitting poor Myrtle, she had no clue that she was even the women her husband was cheating on her with. So based on the backstory of her intent she was able to get off clean.

In another circumstance of Daisy, intentions can be the deciding factor of other people as well. As readers we see a hopeful love story blooming between Daisy and Jay. Gatsby knew the day would come where they would live happily ever after from the moment he first kissed her. “He knew that when he kissed this girl… his mind would never romp again, like the mind of God” (Fitzgerald 111) he knew very well he would be changed by Daisy’s presence in his life, he just didn’t know how much he would change himself.  Gatsby anxiously awaits the moment Daisy will leave her smothering husband for him, but by the end of the novel it seems he has waited for nothing. Daisy’s true intentions were divulged and they were far from what we expected, she had never planned to do anything about her two love affairs. Daisy was very good at masking her intentions and putting up her facade. Until Tom Buchanan, her husband, finds out what’s really going on “she realized at last what she was doing–and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all” (Fitzgerald 132). She wasn’t planning on saying anything, she was planning on living a double life, one with Gatsby and one with Tom.  We as readers dislike seeing this side of her because she isn’t the same girl Gatsby paints a picture of. Daisy had played Gatsby and the readers, and kept her intentions buried. She had played a perfect part and kept her facade till her planned failed and the news broke she wasn’t leaving Tom for the “Great Gatsby”.

The most important involvement of intentions in the whole novel would be the “great” Jay Gatsby and his life story. All of his adult life Gatsby has been trying to regain the love of his life and doing anything, literally anything, to do so. Gatsby the seemingly kind hearted, wouldn’t hurt a fly type of man was in reality a mobster. In order to make his riches, build his new identity and in turn win back the love of his life, he commited corrupt deeds. Yet why does America still view him as the “great” Gatsby? As Cohen explains in his article “what makes him a masterful literacy achievement rather than a two-bit criminal, is the driving force behind his well orchestrated rise:… jilted by the most popular girl in louisville … he spent a lifetime working to get her back” (Cohen 2). Good intentions were able to wipe his slate clean. We as readers strongly detest the thick facade he plasters over himself but yet we still love him because his intentions are so pure. They are the same as when he was a young man just building himself up. Instead of five push-ups to get where he wanted to be it changed to illegal actions. Even Nick Carraway, the most honest character in the whole novel, supports his every move though knowing his past. This is because to focus on those simple illegal acts would be completely ignoring his life goal of getting the girl, he “paid a high price for living to long with a single dream” (Fitzgerald 161). We all pity his long journey for love and how he spent his whole life changing. Everyone in the story is simply captivated by him because he does everything humanly possible to put forth the best version of himself, which is a very human trait, he just takes a different route to get there. Jay Gatsby is still considered a good man because he wasn’t a criminal out of malice but rather love.

So do intentions really matter? What is the deciding factor between an accident or murder? Does doing it for love change the significance of the actions? The Great Gatsby is a stellar piece of literature used to examine these difficult moral questions. Jay Gatsby is a perfect example of how intentions can change how your actions are viewed. In American literature, he is seen as a good person not a criminal. We never truly hear about his terrible crimes he committed to become rich, simply because he did it out of love. So the answer is yes, intentions matter because they can either send you to jail or make you a “true literary achievement”.