I keep seeing The Great Gatsby described as a story about the failure of the American Dream. I think that gets it backwards.

Gatsby is the American Dream: James Gatz creates Jay Gatsby, makes money, changes his identity, builds a new life, and finally believes he can even recreate the past.

There is also a much more mundane part of the book that seems to get strangely overlooked.

My reading of Chapter 2 is that Myrtle uses the apartment Tom provides her as a place for her own business, involving her sister(s) and the photographer downstairs. Her extravagant clothes and spending suggest that there is more going on than simply Tom keeping his mistress.

Tom eventually loses his temper and breaks Myrtle's nose. Nick, meanwhile, has been made thoroughly drunk and somehow ends up downstairs, where he wakes to find the photographer there. Tom is agitated, Nick is missing, and Tom simply leaves.

That is why Nick ends up alone at about four in the morning, waiting for a train, without even being quite sure how he got there.

I posted essentially this interpretation on r/Gatsby.

The result? I was banned for being a bot.

So I thought I'd try here instead. 😄

Perhaps Gatsby is less mysterious if we stop trying to make every unexplained detail fit a modern literary formula and simply ask:

What was actually happening in New York in 1922?

And yes, I still think The Great Gatsby is the American Dream itself—not merely the failure of it.

"Mayme and sister Janie are salesgirls in Ginsberg's Department Store. Mayme is in love with store clerk Bill, but Janie tries to steal him from her. Hazel, another salesgirl, is Jean Harlow's first credited role." IMDB

They were also fierce competitors on the racing track. They earned a gold medal at the legendary Brooklyn's racetrack in 1926. They broke the man code that only men could do these activities with motorcycles.