F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which is set in New York City in 1922, was published in 1926 and is considered today as “one of the most popular novels of our time.” Taught as a canonical text in American literature courses in high schools, colleges, and universities, it is represented as having captured the quintessential modern American experience of reinvention, upward mobility, and tragic romance of the 1920s— a myth that is still central and prevalent in the United States today. F. Scott Fitzgerald “had realized,” writes Janet Flanner who knew Fitzgerald in Paris in the 1920s, “that the bootlegger Gatsby represented the perfect picaresque American figure in that extraordinary alcoholic era […]. Scott had the true tragic sense.” Gatsby has been made into television and Hollywood movies, which perpetuate this American myth. Thus Gatsby has become a cultural product that has been interpreted to reproduce a key American myth, which generates the State and the Ideological State apparatuses.

But a rereading of Fitzgerald's classic through the lens of race theory, deleuzian psychoanalysis, and postcolonial and poststructural thought opens The Great Gatsby to new analytic spaces and new associations, stretching our visions of the text to new domains and challenging the Ideological State apparatus, particularly the media and literary critics and their representation of the text. The new analytic spaces shift the focus from Gatsby to Nick Carraway, who is the change agent in the text. Nick is the one who retreats from high modernism in New York back to the Midwest. In this chapter, I focus on and read Nick, a representative of the money elite, as a duplicitous, complex, contradictory character/ narrator who has a need to define events and people, including himself and Gatsby, in one- dimensional narratives, despite the fact that events and people are heterogeneous and multiple. Second, I examine how Fitzgerald's Nick, like Lewis in Babbitt, establishes and reinforces a structured racial hierarchy coded into the practices of the social order, which he never questions. Then, I examine how Nick moves to colonize/ control/ reconfigure an emerging racially and ethnically unequal diverse modern America whose ethics and morality are substantially different from the ethics and morality of the Anglo- Saxon, Protestant, puritan old stock, of which he claims to belong.