All White in the End: From the Passage of James Wait to the Passing of James Gatz; Intertextuality and the Riddle of Race in The Great Gatsby

For over a century, scholars have failed to recognize that F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous imposter, Jay Gatsby, is a literary descendant of Joseph Conrad's Black imposter, James Wait, in The Nigger of the "Narcissus." As this essay shows, by conspicuously using Conrad's novel as a palimpsest on and over which to write The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald, through intertextuality, reveals Gatsby's race and comments on the themes of racial passing, miscegenation, and anti-Blackness in 1920s America.