The Case for Treating Gatsby as a Real Person

t is a truth universally acknowledged, that a reader in possession of a novel with a distinctive voice often finds the very substance of her thought affected by that book’s characters as if they were real. Yet, in my younger and more vulnerable years an English professor once gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like asking if fictional characters are ‘real’,” he told me, “just remember that fiction is by definition not real, and that the