Jay Gatsby, a man who "appears to be mentally ill" or "a lunatic"? In my eyes, as with the prior editors, Gatsby is far from insane. He knows exactly what he is doing and for what reasons, an indication of complete sanity. However, if one is using this epithet loosely, as used in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye in which a madman is a colloquialism used frequently to express Holden's crazy antics, then perhaps one can infer that Gatsby is acting a little crazy in his obsession with Daisy.
After all, is it "normal" to throw lavish parties and not attend in order to attract the woman of your dreams, night after night, watching and hoping that she will attend? Is it "normal" that his sole reason of being is to be with his past love? Is it "normal" that he
commits himself to “the following of a grail” in his pursuit of her and what she represents. This obsession is characteristic of a dreamer like Gatsby, who loses a sense of reality but rather believes in “a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.”
In my eyes, is Jay Gatsby a "madman" in the denotative meaning? No. But, if one is using "madman" in the looser sense, a person who "loses a sense of reality", and who is senselessly trying to recreate the past creating potential havoc in the process, then I would have to agree.
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