The Great Gatsby is a book about America—its boundless promise, its callow follies, its wealth, moralism, restlessness, and even, as the title suggests, its greatness. Art reproduces experience, but it rearranges the pieces so that we see ourselves in a new light. The best literature is kaleidoscopic; read at different moments, it reveals different ironies and truths and makes us feel in different ways. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is just such a work. A tragedy, love story, farce, and morality play, in its final pages, it becomes a meditation on the republic that stretches from Long Island Sound to the far reaches of a continent still discovering itself.
Gatsby turned 100 this year. Next year, America will turn 250, and the novel still sheds light on the nation. The themes that Gatsby evokes—aspiration and class resentment, hope, the thirst for some kind of greatness—remain very much a part of American life today, though the vagaries of history have rearranged them into strange new forms.
The light Gatsby sheds on America has always been ambiguous, like the green light across the bay that guides its hero to his tragic fate. Jay Gatsby—or James Gatz, as he seems to have been born—is that quintessentially American figure, the self-made man. But self-made, in Gatsby’s case, means also invented and unreal. Gatsby’s origins are swathed in rumor and innuendo, and the sources of his fabulous wealth are murky. The shimmering surfaces of the Roaring Twenties form the novel’s décor, and its ambiance is a little tipsy, so we are never quite sure what is real in Jay Gatsby’s story and what are mere refractions built into the narration. The novel’s liquidity of perspective—and prose that dazzles—are among Fitzgerald’s great literary merits.
Rebelling against the poverty of his upbringing, James Gatz had been driven since adolescence by the desire for wealth. Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes, “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
The Allure of Green
As his own invention, Gatsby has no Father but himself, and the book is replete with idolatries, both cosmic and darkly comic. Yet Gatsby, his smile glittering with youthful charm, is no mere slave of Mammon; what makes him sympathetic, even admirable, is that he is driven most deeply not by materialism but by youthful romance. Everything Gatsby does, from the mansion that he purchases to the lavish parties that he throws, is meant to win over Daisy, a beauty from Old Money whom he had loved as a penniless soldier on the eve of the First World War. Fitzgerald is painfully sensitive to Old Money’s capacity to exploit the poor and to protect its privileges against both the masses and the nouveau riche like Gatsby. Perhaps naively, Gatsby had expected that wealth would also bring him belonging. In the end, it only brings him notoriety. The same forces driving Fitzgerald’s novel—the condescension of elites and the mix of envy and resentment it provokes—continue to shape America’s social life and politics, dominated for the past decade by an improbable populist billionaire.
The possibilities of the American continent, for all its vastness, are not unlimited. And the span of any human life is inadequate to its aspirations.
One could draw parallels between Jay Gatsby and the current president—both showmen given to extravagance—but their characters are starkly different. Though he tries to hide it, Gatsby is at root a Midwesterner. He has no real instinct for vengeance. He might be clad in gaudy suits, but it’s his hidden innocence that makes Gatsby great. Greatness and goodness are not synonymous, but the former requires at least something of the latter. Despite the squalor of his business dealings and the careless excess of those around him, Gatsby’s imagination retains a kind of purity, the “incorruptible dream” of Daisy and all that she has come to mean.
In the end, Gatsby’s hope is disappointed. In truth, it was misplaced from the beginning. Desirable because she seemed just this side of unattainable, Daisy charms because of her superficiality, because there is not much to her beyond money, because Gatsby is able to project upon her, as if onto a blank screen, all the infinite and contradictory desires of his own imagination. While Gatsby was away at war, she had married the brutish and entitled—but rich and well-connected—Tom Buchanan. When he made his fortune, Gatsby would purchase the mansion across the bay from Tom and Daisy’s house and at night gaze out at the green light on the end of their dock, a symbol meaning everything and nothing.
In the end, Gatsby’s idealism asks too much of Daisy, and she balks before it. Tom Buchanan, with an instinct for cruelty that Gatsby lacks, is willing to play the libertine or the prig if it suits him and will use any means available to protect what is his. Fitzgerald’s verdict on the couple is devastating: “They were careless people Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
There is something juvenile in both Gatsby and the Buchanans—the Buchanans’ self-absorption and Gatsby’s infatuation—but, for all its callowness, Gatsby’s naivete is one that aspires, charms, dreams, and builds. The novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, identifies Gatsby’s defining characteristic as “an extraordinary gift for hope.” In him, ingenuousness combines with ingenuity in a characteristically American way. One hears echoes in Gatsby of Christopher Newman, the protagonist of Henry James’s The American, whose wealth proves no match for Old World cynicism. Even at the novel’s end, when his dreams of a future with Daisy lie in ruins, Gatsby seems willing to believe that in the morning, somehow, all will be better.
Beat On, Boats Against the Current
Perfection is not required for greatness. Gatsby’s promise is never fully realized, and in this, his cardinal virtue—hopefulness—mirrors America’s own. Fitzgerald makes the connection explicit in the novel’s haunting final paragraphs. Nick Carraway, ready to abandon the East and return to his own Midwestern roots, imagines the structures of New York fading away and the thick primeval forest of Long Island returning—the “fresh green breast of the new world.” The first Dutch sailors landing there, he imagines, beheld a continent that had promised man “for the last time in history […] something commensurate with his capacity for wonder.”
Critics might point out—with some justification—that this vision of a virgin continent is itself tinged with illusion and that those illusions would have tragic consequences in the interactions of Native Americans and European immigrants. Radical critics, such as the 1619 Project, label American ideals false from the beginning and the nation a “slavocracy.” Reading Gatsby, one feels the pull, but also the inadequacy, of such churlish ideology.
A sense of divine justice and a self-indulgent tendency to forget about it are both characteristically American traits.
The novel’s critique of Gatsby’s idealism runs deeper than politics or economics and touches human nature. Gatsby makes us feel both the necessity of our dreams and their inherent illusoriness. Once structures are built on Long Island—whether log cabins or skyscrapers, churches or casinos—the place’s infinite possibility is gone forever. The nemesis who ultimately bests Jay Gatsby is time. Once he has reunited with Daisy and the enchantment of the thought of her inevitably begins to wear off, Nick Carraway warns, “You can’t repeat the past.” To which, the millionaire replies incredulously, “Can’t repeat the past? […] Why of course you can!” Like Ahab with his fist raised against the whale, Gatsby fights with heroic defiance, but in the end is mortal.
The possibilities of the American continent, for all its vastness, are not unlimited. And the span of any human life is inadequate to its aspirations. Theologians label the projection of man’s infinite longings onto finite objects “idolatry,” and, every once in a while, the stern categories of Christian moralism poke through the surface of Gatsby’s Jazz Age trappings. The foundation stones of American society, after all, were laid by Puritans, and young Scott Fitzgerald had no doubt been taught as a child by the Baltimore Catechism to both hope for and fear the final judgment.
God’s judgment has haunted even Americans of unorthodox religious sentiments, like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and it haunts The Great Gatsby, too. Among the novel’s most darkly comic images are a pair of all-seeing eyes—a faded billboard for the optometrist Doctor T. J. Eckleburg—that pass silent judgment on the happenings below. Unlike the monied “rotten crowd” that is indifferent to the lives it smashes up, Fitzgerald is capable of seeing the “valley of ashes” that American excess leaves behind and the “ash-gray men” who struggle through it. And the wages of sin are paid. Gatsby’s death is described with the sacrificial vocabulary of the Old Testament: “the holocaust was complete.” He is mourned only by Nick Carraway and the father he had abandoned. The Buchanans retain their wealth, but have to live with themselves.
A sense of divine justice and a self-indulgent tendency to forget about it are both characteristically American traits. Faith runs deep in our national consciousness—driving great awakenings, social reforms, and countless personal journeys—but none are more proficient constructors of idols than Americans. Fitzgerald seemed to sense that the 1920s, when Gatsby was published, was one of those moments in which the tides of American life flowed toward hedonism and away from God. Yet, perhaps despite himself, the author remained ever the Midwestern Catholic who, on some level, knew that the siren songs of wealth and romantic love can never satisfy our deepest longing. Hope, after all, is a theological virtue—one which will remain unfulfilled by anything less than the infinitude of God.
Americans will continue to remember and forget that lesson, like the rest of mankind, and in our own particularly American way. In its second century, The Great Gatsby still helps us to see ourselves doing so. Today, as in the Roaring Twenties, I suspect that our country could use a bit more Christian ballast and a bit less empty salesmanship, though Fitzgerald’s great novel offers no particular social manifesto for how we might do so. It is a tragedy in the classic sense, ending in the cathartic death of its hero. The novel’s genius is showing that the hero’s tragic flaw is precisely the American optimism that would seem to make tragedy passé. But it’s not a condemnation of that hopefulness; Fitzgerald’s final lines seem to invite us to keep hoping, to “beat on, boats against the current.” Even if we never reach that green light, something great might emerge in the process. America’s critics sometimes fault her for failing to live up to her ideals. But such failure is only possible when one dares to believe to begin with.
Perhaps no other work of literature captures that dynamic—national virtue and tragic flaw—like The Great Gatsby. Reading the novel again as we approach, with some unease, a quarter-millennium of the American experiment, I suspect—and I hope—that we are still capable of preserving, and rearranging, the pieces. We still have, as the novel puts it, “one fine morning—” before us.
