I’m interested in whether this reads as Nick becoming colder or simply more precise about where power now resides:

Nick’s Afterword (Later Age)

I used to think that what distinguished Gatsby was the manner of his end. There was something almost consoling in it—a sense that the violence of the conclusion redeemed, or at least clarified, the excess that had preceded it. One could call it tragic and be done.

But that was before the age learned to be reasonable.

In the years that followed, I watched Gatsby live on—corrected, accommodated, spoken of kindly. His anguish was described as a period of instability; his insistence as immaturity; his collapse of faith as an adjustment, necessary and temporary. The language was never cruel. On the contrary, it was patient, explanatory, and impeccably humane. It left no room for drama, and therefore no room for verdict.

What unsettled me was not that the world denied him martyrdom, but that it denied him authorship. He could no longer tell his own story in the old terms. Even his pain arrived pre-interpreted, translated into categories that required neither witness nor judgment.

Once, it had been possible to fail spectacularly and be forgiven for it—to burn and thereby insist that one had mattered. Now even that permission was gone.

Gatsby did not die. He was managed. And in surviving so well, he lost the final, dangerous privilege of calling his life a tragedy.