[On April 10th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I have my problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and important novels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellow GatsbyStudiers!]
On two contrasting
but also interconnected ways to analyze the novel’s title character and themes.
On the actual
centennial of Gatsby’s publication, I have to start by noting that
apparently, at the very last minute (and thus too far into the publishing
process), Fitzgerald tried to get the book’s title changed to Under
the Red, White, and Blue. That hyperlinked piece features info about a
recent public scholarly book, Greil Marcus’s Under
the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment, and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby (2021), which takes
Fitzgerald’s alternate title as a starting point for thinking about the book’s,
it’s era’s, and our own engagements with key American themes. Since I’m going
to do the same here (having so far read only excerpts of Marcus’s book,
although I hope to check the whole thing out soon as it looks great), I wanted
to shout-out Marcus’s work as well as Fitzgerald’s original title, before
offering my own considerations of Gatsby’s
American Dream (which is also, as that hyperlinked record label page
reflects, the name of an indie rock band, reflecting just how ubiquitous this association
has been).
On the one
hand, Gatsby’s American Dream seems at best profoundly ironic, and at worst
entirely fake and false. After all, the centerpiece of his dreams is Daisy Buchanan,
a character who is not only married to someone else, and an awful someone at
that (the exemplary American white
supremacist Tom Buchanan), but whose most defining action in the novel is
the accidental murder of another character (the tragic Myrtle Wilson, whom I
mentioned in last week’s final post as a perspective we need to consider more
fully and then am not really considering more fully this week—my bad, Myrtle!)
from which she literally and figuratively flees, leaving her supposed love to
take the fall. At the
novel’s conclusion, its narrator Nick says of Daisy and Tom that “They were
careless people…they shamed 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,” and if we even
somewhat agree with Nick, we have to recognize that Gatsby’s dreams and his titular
greatness alike are built on a very shaky foundation.
But on the
other hand, I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Daisy herself can be read as
a far more nuanced and sympathetic character than Nick’s vision of her suggests
(Tom definitely can’t, but he can within this alternative frame be read as
abusive toward Daisy, just as he physically abuses Myrtle in their
one scene together in the novel), as both flawed and full of potential in ways
that in this reading would parallel Gatsby and help explain their mutual attraction.
But Gatsby’s dreams are also not limited to Daisy, especially as the reader
learns more about Gatsby (or James Gatz, as he was born) in his childhood and
youthful identity, experiences, perspectives, and arc. That young man’s goals
of moving beyond the horizons of his parents and his hometown, of remaking
himself, of pursuing his own future rather than being defined by what had come
before, are, as the novel’s iconic
final lines illustrate, very much the story of America as well, from its
founding (whenever and however we locate that moment) on down. The fact that he
doesn’t quite succeed, or rather that the past remains with him as he moves
into that future, could be read as a failure or as ironic or etc.—but it could
also be read as deeply human, as the intersection of the worst and best that
defines us all, individuals and nations alike.
Last
GatsbyStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do
you think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?
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