There's something sadly comical about such a character, in keeping with Fitzgerald's underappreciated brand of humor. Though Nick almost succumbs to Gatsby's charm on their first meeting, he quickly reminds himself that his neighbor is only "an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd." He's right, of course: Gatsby is ridiculous in his pretensions, in his faux-gentlemanly habit of saying, far too often, "old sport," in his too perfect closet full of suits and his ambitious library of unread books.
He resents it when Tom, as a member of the social elite, claims never to have heard of the bond firm for which he works, but then concentrates his own somewhat snobbish skepticism on his self-made neighbor. He attended Yale with Daisy's husband, Tom Buchanan, and recognizes their wealth and privilege as far above his own place on the class ladder. The genius of this novel lies in the narrative tension between Nick's perceptions and Gatsby's mythmaking.
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