Here, Dyson addresses the question of what it is that the level-headed narrator sees in his friend, the shady millionaire Jay Gatsby. Carraway, who takes pride in facing realities - claiming that he is "five years too old to lie to [him]self and call it honor" (Fitzgerald, 119) - is nonetheless driven to abandon his "conscious moral instinct," which would lead him to see through Gatsby's thin veneer of respectability. The latter's claims that he is the son of "some wealthy people from the Middle West," and that he was "educated at Oxford," are obviously fraudulent (43). Yet, while the narrator remarks that he "knew why Jordan Baker believed Gatsby was lying," he cannot bring himself to hold the title character in contempt. This is because Carraway is too captivated by Gatsby's "romantic promise," seeing him as a secular saint, or messiah figure. Indeed, Gatsby is regarded as a "Son of God" by the narrator, who seeks deliverance from the harsh realities to which he has grown accustomed. Similar faith is placed in the romantic heroes in Jack Kerouac's On The Road and J.D. Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction. In Road, Sal Paradise sees his buddy, Dean Moriarty, as the "saint of the lot" by virtue of his knowing "IT." Likewise, in Seymour, the title character is recognized as a saint, with visions of a Christ-like "Fat Lady" (Salinger, 186). As with the idea of romantic promise, IT and the Fat Lady are both abstract notions - or, to use Dean's phrase, "imponderables" - which neither the narrators nor their romantic heroes seem capable of defining in specific terms. This is, perhaps, because the significance of these imponderables lies in the very fact that they are not of the "real world." Rather, they seem to exist outside their respective presents, in ambiguous realms governed by "the past and the imagination" (Hunt, 126). As such, they are seen as romantic and holy truths, unfettered by realistic constraints. It follows that the "saints" who embody these truths appear as innocents: sheltered and out of touch with the "inexorably unromantic real world[s]" they inhabit (Mizener,116).
Gatsby's facade of innocence is supported by his lavish, yet secluded lifestyle on West Egg, Long Island. As its name suggests, West Egg resembles a protective "shell," in which the romantic hero appears shielded from the falseness and depravity of the 1920s. Indeed, even the Jazz Age revelers who attend his parties have no contact with Gatsby himself. Because nothing is known about him, he appears remote and flawless. This is the case, at least, until he falls for Daisy Buchanan. Daisy and her husband, Tom, serve as embodiments of modernist moral decay: the former, with her tinkling, artificial laugh (Fitzgerald, 24), and the latter, with his overt racism and brutality. Despite wishing that the world would stand "at a sort of moral attention forever" (3), Carraway has resigned himself to the company of these "careless people" (Lehan, 67). Nonetheless, he yearns to recapture a pre-modernist sensibility, which he perceives as "morally superior" to that of his own time (Lehan, 101). For this reason, he permits himself to buy into the stories that depict Gatsby as mythic figure from "America's idealized past" (Hunt, 73). Perpetuated by both Gatsby and his guests - the ones he never sees - these stories are far more fantastic and, indeed, far more innocent than the man they profess to characterize.
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