gatsby as a personality quiz

I love personality quizzes. I mean, love them. I’ve taken so many on the Internet (well the free ones at least) and I’ve always found the results fascinating.

So given my love for personal psychology, I thought, why not take a personality quiz for Gatsby? After all, there was that psychoanalysis critique of Gatsby we had in class (unfortunately I didn’t run fast enough to grab it), but I figured this would be my own chance to psychoanalysis Gatsby myself.
So here’s what I did: I went on 16personalities.com (the best personality quiz in my expert opinion) and answered all the questions honestly from Gatsby’s point of view.

And now, I present to you, my findings:

Gatsby’s overall personality type is “Advocate.” Now what does this mean?

According to 16personality’s definition, “Advocates are soft spoken, but have strong opinions and will fight tirelessly for what they believe in. Advocates also have an inborn sense of idealism and morality, but what sets them apart is that they are not idle dreamers. These individuals are capable of taking concrete steps to realize their goals.”

Now, already, this describes Gatsby: idealistic (yeah), tireless (um, yes), and taking concrete steps to realize their goals (literally buying a house to get to Daisy, hello?)
But let’s get into more details. What’s great about this quiz is it breaks down a personality type into a bunch of subcategories.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go through every category (some of them like parenthood and workplace habits are basically irrelevant), but some of these descriptors are scary accurate.

So first off, what are Gatsby’s strengths and weaknesses?

I don’t want to bore you with my explanations, so I’ll just put some screenshots here that you can see for yourself.

Now, not all of these totally describe Gatsby, but I think we can all agree that Gatsby is passionate and insightful. I mean, spending years dedicated to the sole chasing of one person requires passion. As far as weaknesses go, Gatsby is definitely sensitive and private - in fact, he has the "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" (Fitzgerald 2) and due to his privacy, has plenty of rumors floating around him.

The accuracy is only scarier from here. Let's take a look at how advocates approach romantic relationships and friendships.

 Gatsby is probably the most serious you can be about a relationship - going beyond marriage into straight up stalker territory. "deep" "sincere" and "serious" doesn't even begin to describe how Gatsby feels about Daisy, enough said.

And for friendships?

Again, the quiz hits it head on. Gatsby doesn't open up to Nick easily - he can't even ask him about Daisy directly, he has to ask Jordan as a go between. However, Gatsby eventually gets comfortable enough around Nick to share his twisted backstory. But Gatsby also is pretty insightful - in the beginning, Nick describes Gatsby as one that sees you deeply - his smile is one that "understands you just as you wanted to be understood" (Fitzgerald 48). Now, that's pretty insightful. 

Lastly, this personality quiz compares you to famous people with the same personality type. 

(This is irrelevant to analysis, I just find it funny that Gatsby is like Marie Kondo. You could say this sparks joy in me.)

So overall I think that this quiz was accurate (even more than I expected considering that for some questions in the personality test I didn't know how to respond for Gatsby). Sorry that this post was so lengthy!

If you want to take this personality quiz, go to 16personalities.com, I've taken the quiz myself and thought it was very interesting to learn about myself (I'm a protagonist which is the same type as Barack Obama apparently).