The Great (1925) represents the diminishing moral authority of uplift stories in an age of declining faith in the nation's ability to assimilate new immigrants. Through the eyes of Fitzgerald's narrator, Nick Carraway, appears in the guise of the archetypal, if somewhat misguided, self-made man in America. Gatsby's upward struggle is inspired by traditional purveyors of middle-class success, such as Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger Jr.. However, another less virtuous narrative of Gatsby's self-making unfolds, which connects our hero's business schemes to the tainted hand of immigrant gangsters. A story of entrepreneurial corruption, accented by the language of nativism, competes with and ultimately foils the traditional narrative of virtuous American uplift. In this way, stages a national anxiety about the loss of white Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the Twenties. Nick informs the reader in the opening pages that, despite his hero's criminal connections, Gatsby turned out all right at the end (6). In order to fulfill this expectation, the novel's famous conclusion must elide the narrative struggle--perpetrated by Gatsby's nativist rival, Tom Buchanan--over the ethnic as well as ethical nature of our hero's enterprise. On the book's final page, Tom's interrogation into Gatsby's clouded is displaced by Nick's inspirational vision of Gatsby's inviolate dream of the New World. The narrator conceives a myth of American origins by imagining the Dutch explorers' initial contact with a virgin continent. Through this incarnation becomes great: a forward-looking visionary who not only transcends the crisis of his contemporary moment but who is associated with the nation's legendary pastoral promise. The frequently cited conclusion of The Great illustrates nationalism in its generalized form as well as in a manifestation peculiar to the 1920s. Broadly speaking, Fitzgerald represents the Janus-faced logic of nationalism by offering, on the one side, a promising future in the prophesy tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- and, on the other, an immemorial myth of American national origins envisioned by boats ... borne back ceaselessly into the past (189).1 I offer the final passage from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams as a gloss on Gatsby's pristine dream in the famous last lines of Fitzgerald's novel.