In some of Americans' most durable western stories, idealistic beliefs have often coexisted with accidental or intentional violence, as they do in The Great Gatsby, in which three people are killed in a chain of presumed accident and mistaken revenge. The story of marital misery, betrayal, murder, and suicide would not be so familiar or have become so canonized without the nationally allegorical burden it self-consciously bears through Nick Carraway's rendering of it and through Fitzgerald's intricate verbal weaving of capitalist and historical motifs, especially western ones, from Thomas Jefferson to the Nevada silver fields. Marriage and its constellation of jealousies and conquests is the plot-shaping structure through which Fitzgerald dissects the ways that ethnic and class divisions perpetuate both the romance and violence of American civilization.