The novel never loses the position from which Gatsby can be understood.
That is the structural fact behind its Level 2 determination. Fitzgerald builds an unusually dense representational system around Gatsby’s attempt to convert desire into reality: wealth becomes identity, geography becomes class, objects become promises, and the present is forced to carry an image of the past. The novel deepens that system relentlessly, but it does not make the reader’s own orientation toward reality collapse with Gatsby’s.
Gatsby’s central error therefore becomes more legible as the novel proceeds, not less. He does not merely want Daisy in the present. He needs the present to certify a representation he has constructed of the past. The mansion, the parties, the shirts and the green light acquire their force because they belong to that same attempt: material reality is organized as evidence that the imagined history can still be made true.
Fitzgerald’s achievement is the precision with which a small symbolic field carries an increasingly large structure. East Egg and West Egg organize class; Daisy’s voice binds desire to money; the valley of ashes gives consequence a geography; the green light compresses distance, futurity and retrospective longing into a single object. The novel does not discover a new explanatory mechanism beneath these representations. It makes the representations themselves extraordinarily efficient.