Minor Charactors The Great Gatsby Essay Research

Minor Charactors, The Great Gatsby Essay, Research Paper

Nick Langworth

English 11

Wednesday, May 05, 1999

Minor Characters

In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the minor characters play an important role in

contributing to the plot, theme and give the reader an overall understanding of the novel as a whole. The

three most important minor characters in the novel are Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan.s secret mistress,

George Wilson, Myrtle.s husband and the owner of a run down garage on the side of the road leading into

the city, and finally Jordan Baker, an attractive young woman golfer who is a compulsive liar, she also

eventually becomes more and more involved with Nick Carroway, the narrator. All three of these characters

contribute a great deal to the novel as a whole. Though their parts are small, without them the novel would

not be the masterpiece that it is.

Jordan Baker is the minor character with the biggest part. she is seen very often throughout the

novel. Jordan Baker.s most striking quality is her dishonestly. She is tough and aggressive-a tournament

golfer who is so hardened by competition and because ot that she is willing to do anything to win. At the end

of Chapter III, when Nick is thinking about Jordan, he remembers a story about her first major tournament.

.At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers-a suggestion that she

had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of the

scandal-then died away. A caddie retracted his statement and the only other witness admitted that he might

have been mistaken. the incident and the name had remained together in my mind.. pg. 63. This incident

stays with the reader throughout the novel, reminding the reader (as it reminds Nick) that Jordan is the smart

but extremely dishonest new woman, the opportunist who will do whatever she must to be successful in her

world.

Jordan Baker.s use in the novel helps Fitzgerald get the story told. Because she is Daisy’s

friend from Louisville, she can supply Nick with information he would not have otherwise. She also serves as

a link between the major characters, moving back and forth between the world of East Egg (Tom and Daisy’s

house) and West Egg (Gatsby’s and Nick’s houses). She is rich enough to be comfortable among the East

Eggers but enough of a social hustler to appear at Gatsby’s parties.

Jordan serves still another purpose, she is actually Nick’s girlfriend during the summer of 1922. The

Nick-Jordan romance serves as a good sub-plot to the Gatsby-Daisy relationship, and allows the reader to

compare and contrast the romantic-dream like love of Gatsby for Daisy to a very practical but weak

relationship created through Nick and Jordan. Fitzgerald brilliantly uses Jordan Baker to incorporate Nick

into the novel as more than the narrator but as a real person. Jordan is also used to show the contrast

between two different kinds of relationships, that of Gatsby and Daisy and Jordan and Nick.

Myrtle Wilson is another minor character that plays a great role in The Great Gatsby. She is the wife

of George Wilson. Myrtle is a very important character, because Fitzgerald uses her to help expose Tom.s

brutality and to show how Tom is a hypocrite. Fitzgerald uses Myrtle because it shows how Tom thinks of

her as one of his possessions, she is displayed openly to all of Tom.s friends and acquaintances and they all

freely accept her. Tom uses Myrtle for the fueling of his own ego because it makes him feel powerful and

superior.

The novel is propelled into excellence because of Fitzgerald.s ability to use Myrtle to help portray

Tom as an evil, brutal and hypocritical man. By incorporating Myrtle into the novel Tom becomes hated more

by the reader because he disapproves Daisy.s relationship with Gatsby but he feels that his relationship with

Myrtle is appropriate because Myrtle is nothing more than a possession to him.

Myrtle is basically confined to chapter II, except for when she is killed in the end of the novel. During

chapter II the reader finds that Myrtle.s one wish is to leave her class and to become on of the elite rich.

Myrtle obviously has the logic and morals to become one of the elite because she is obsessed with

appearances and unaware of the realities of life. Myrtle says that she married George .because I thought he

was a gentleman…I thought he knew something about breeding but he wasn.t fit to lick my shoe.. (pg. 39).

Myrtle honestly thinks that she is above George and that he is so far below her because , in her mind, she is

one of the elite because of her relationship with Tom. In reality Myrtle is just another one of Tom.s

possessions.

Fitzgerald uses Myrtle to show the reader how the disillusioned life of the rich is not confined to the

rich alone. Myrtle is from a lower class but yet she has shares the same perspective on life with Tom and

the rest of th

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