“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”
You can hear the sigh of despair in Nick’s voice at the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But, why the despair?
The West, after all, is the Land of Promise. It is a rather important part of the American Story. Go West, Young Man! Trivia time: what is the origin of that phrase? Often attributed to Horace Greely (19th century newspaperman), nobody can find a record of him actually writing or saying it. So, nobody knows the origin of the phrase. Yet, if you want a phase that captures the American Spirit of the West, it is hard to do better. Go West!
What happens when you Go West? You make your Fortune! You live Free! Unbounded possibilities! Take Jay Gatsby. He meets a girl, but alas, she comes from a higher social circle than his. In any other time or any other place, the story ends there. But Gatsby is from the West, so he knows this is not the end of the story. He sets out to make his fortune. He rises to the top.
The Great Gatsby starts off like every other Horatio Alger novel. Poor kid meets someone who gives him an opportunity and the kid seizes the opportunity and becomes wealthy and lives happily ever after. Rags to Riches! Only in America! It isn’t just fictional stories. It’s the American Story! Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery is exactly the same story. The financial titans of the late 19th and early 20th century often started with nothing. Gatsby is just an example of the American Dream.
Except…it doesn’t work. Gatsby becomes extraordinarily wealthy…and ends up dead in his pool.
What happened? This isn’t the way the story was supposed to end, right? Gatsby gets rich, Daisy is still waiting for him, and they marry and live happily ever after. Alright, Daisy got married in the meantime, but that’s OK; Tom quietly quits the scene, leaving Daisy free to head off with Gatsby. OK, Daisy isn’t leaving Tom, but Jordan is there as an acceptable substitute for Daisy and Gatsby marries her instead and heads off into the sunset, living happily ever after. OK, Jordan won’t work out, but at least Gatsby finds joy in being the star of the Cool Kids as they all come to His Parties and He is The Man.
But, no. Gatsby is shot in his pool for something he did not do. But, at least his funeral was a grand affair with Everyone Who Is Anyone there and nary a dry eye in sight. Nope, not that either. Nick:
I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone….At first I was surprised and confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end.
Remember, Nick is not a childhood friend or someone who has been with Gatsby through thick and thin. He just happens to be the guy who rented the summer cottage next door to Gatsby’s place. Nick, Gatsby’s father, and the minister are the entire crowd at the funeral.
Remember the American Dream? It is not just Gatsby who is floating dead in that pool. The American Dream died there too. There is no optimistic future possible. You can’t change your situation in life, you can’t rise to the top, there are no riches that come to those in rags. In the end, the past wins and we all go on living the lives into which we were born. You can Go West, but the East always wins. You can go to America, but the long reach of your homeland keeps you from rising.
The Great Gatsby is a Great Novel, but is it The Great American Novel? Is it the tale that most captures what it means to be American? It can only play that role if the American Dream is dead. And therein lies the question at the root of the entire story. Is the American Experiment, the story that we can rise up above ourselves, that we can become a Great People, that we are not shackled by our past, is that Experiment a failure?
The story isn’t finished. If the American Dream dies, then Gatsby was a prescient novel indeed. But, what if the Dream is not dead? That is the funny thing about Dreams; you can always go on dreaming. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ends on that note of promise, “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” The Dream lives on. You don’t have to accept the constraints of bein’ sivilized by Aunt Sally.
Fitzgerald and Twain thus make a marvelous pair of books for thinking about the American Dream. Combined, they show the power of literature to be greater than mere texts to be analyzed. Both of these books portray a nuanced view of the American Experiment; neither portrays the country as without virtues or without flaws. Read them in tandem and then ask: Assume that the stories told in both of these books are accurate portrayals of the society. Which book’s conclusion is right? Is the American Dream really dead or is there a reason to go on Dreaming?
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