Abstract
This paper discusses the reason for Mimicry and analyzes the mimicry behaviour of the protagonist Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. Influenced by colonial psychology, people from the upper class take their class and race as divine and superior, and thus put mimicry as a kind of method to control the lower class. Therefore, simulation was a contradictory strategy adopted by the colonizers to discipline and control the colonized people, with the aim of establishing the colonizers’ supreme power and privileges. The colonized, as the subordinate part, tries to accept and copy the cultural codes of the colonizers. The impulse stems from the desire for a modified version of an “Other” identity. In this process, the lower class attempts to get rid of the discrimination by the upper class by imitating all social standards, values, and lifestyles of the upper class. The truth is that it not only causes identity issues of the lower class but also brings the illusion of self-identity in the higher class. Jay Gatsby is also the victim of mimicry. His failure in his mimicry to become the upper class is ordained to be.
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How to cite this paper
Mimicry in The Great Gatsby
How to cite this paper: Yeting Ma. (2025) Mimicry in The Great Gatsby. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 9(6), 1078-1081.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.06.004