F. Scott Fitzgerald went through a half-dozen titles for his novel about love and death in the Jazz Age; they all sound faintly ridiculous today: Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; Trimalchio in West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; The High-Bouncing Lover. We all know the one that finally stuck, and why: Its title character, the desperately rich Jay Gatsby, embodies both the promise and the peril of the American dream like few other characters in literature.
We don’t meet Gatsby until nearly a third of the way into the novel that bears his name. Instead Fitzgerald lets Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner fresh out of Yale, lead us into a universe of glittering parties, tawdry drinking spells, and fierce social rivalries. Nick has rented a house on Long Island and becomes friends with Tom Buchanan, a fellow Yalie, and his wife, Daisy; he also falls for Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker, a professional golfer who cheated to win her first tournament. All of them have heard about Nick’s mysterious neighbor Gatsby: Although hundreds of New Yorkers show up to his lavish parties, almost no one knows who he is or where he’s from. He’s rumored to be a bootlegger, or perhaps a more sinister criminal, but the liquor and the fun are flowing at his expense, and the people who might otherwise question his past are mystified by its enigmatic shape. For it turns out that Gatsby, with his bright yellow car and shirts so beautiful they make women burst into tears, is different from what anyone supposed—and that despite his life of excess and vivid notoriety, it is the pursuit of love that will prove his undoing.
On one level, The Great Gatsby is a remarkably trenchant, and enduringly relevant, examination of how money talks (not for nothing does Gatsby respond to Nick’s remark about Daisy’s vocal flirtations with the words: “Her voice is full of money”).
Then as now, establishment wealth meets the newly minted variety with a privileged prejudice that keeps the outsider not only outside, but off guard, no matter how impressive his riches. In an attempt to find his footing, Gatsby pretends that he studied at Oxford (“he’s an Oggsford man,” his fixer Wolfsheim likes to say) not because of any European pretensions, but to disguise his true roots from the Ivy League crowd he’s infiltrated.
For all his savvy, he misses relevant social signals, most notably at a painful lunch with some East Egg WASPs. And yet, while Gatsby’s colorful suits and car—and the ingenuity with which he makes himself up as he goes along—may shock and bewilder the old-money types who party at his house, Fitzgerald paints him as a far more sympathetic character than his heedlessly entitled counterparts, whose unthinking cruelty reaches monstrous heights by the novel’s end.
A book of shimmering social surfaces and hauntingly evanescent private depths, The Great Gatsby imbues its fleet narrative with a formal elegance that has been readily apparent even to the generations of high school students to whom it has been assigned—generally long before they might understand the novel’s grasp of how the intensity of life slips ineluctably away. But it is in its realization of that theme that the work’s true genius lies: Gatsby’s ultimately futile attempt to recapture his youthful passion for Daisy Buchanan makes almost palpable the present’s inability to live up to either past or future, and thereby catches the mood of our national life—and the contradictions of our national character, for which the American Dream never quite fulfills its promise—with poignant fidelity.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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