Fitzgerald bandied around several titles (Under the Red, White, and Blue) before his editor/publisher encouraged him to go with The Great Gatsby. So, he obviously wanted to write not only a great American novel, but a critique on America's moral wasteland. He's writing about two Americas.
According to Cornell Professor Don McCall (who cites another Cornell professor below):
The title of the novel has a special ironic distinction: it says two things at once. First, Gatsby is truly “great,” a legitimate hero. Second, he is a figure in a sideshow, a freak, a carnival oddity, “The Great Gatsby.” At one point the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, sees Gatsby as “a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore.” And the more we get to know the man, the more clearly the two meanings of the title are right—he is indeed exemplary, and he’s a grease-paint Wonder of the Western World striding majestically around on a platform. Cornell Professor Arthur Mizener, the first and still the best of Fitzgerald’s many biographers, sums it up admirably:
In so far as Gatsby represents the simplicity of heart Fitzgerald associated with the Middle West, he is really a great man; in so far as he achieves the kind of notoriety the East accords success of his kind he is about as great as Barnum was. Out of Gatsby’s ignorance of his real greatness and his misunderstanding of his notoriety, Fitzgerald gets most of the book’s direct irony.
Also, the novel is told from Nick's point of view: he's the only one who thinks he's great. He's the only one who attends his funeral. Gatsby is the epitome of focused desire and idealism. So, there's bias involved here.
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