April 10, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Gatsby’s American Dreams

[On April 10th,1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was publishedby Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I havemy problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and importantnovels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’llhighlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellowGatsbyStudiers!]

On two contrastingbut also interconnected ways to analyze the novel’s title character and themes.

On the actualcentennial of Gatsby’s publication, I have to start by noting thatapparently, at the very last minute (and thus too far into the publishingprocess), Fitzgerald tried to get the book’s title changed to Underthe Red, White, and Blue. That hyperlinked piece features info about arecent public scholarly book, Greil Marcus’s Underthe Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment, and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby (2021), which takesFitzgerald’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 goingto 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 wantedto shout-out Marcus’s work as well as Fitzgerald’s original title, beforeoffering my own considerations of Gatsby’sAmerican Dream (which is also, as that hyperlinked record label pagereflects, the name of an indie rock band, reflecting just how ubiquitous this associationhas been).

On the onehand, Gatsby’s American Dream seems at best profoundly ironic, and at worstentirely 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 atthat (the exemplary American whitesupremacist Tom Buchanan), but whose most defining action in the novel isthe accidental murder of another character (the tragic Myrtle Wilson, whom Imentioned in last week’s final post as a perspective we need to consider morefully and then am not really considering more fully this week—my bad, Myrtle!)from which she literally and figuratively flees, leaving her supposed love totake the fall. At thenovel’s conclusion, its narrator Nick says of Daisy and Tom that “They werecareless people…they shamed up things and creatures and then retreated backinto their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept themtogether, and let other people clean up the mess they had made,” and if we evensomewhat agree with Nick, we have to recognize that Gatsby’s dreams and his titulargreatness alike are built on a very shaky foundation.

But on theother hand, I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Daisy herself can be read asa 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 asabusive toward Daisy, just as he physically abuses Myrtle in theirone scene together in the novel), as both flawed and full of potential in waysthat 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 readerlearns more about Gatsby (or James Gatz, as he was born) in his childhood andyouthful identity, experiences, perspectives, and arc. That young man’s goalsof moving beyond the horizons of his parents and his hometown, of remakinghimself, of pursuing his own future rather than being defined by what had comebefore, are, as the novel’s iconicfinal lines illustrate, very much the story of America as well, from itsfounding (whenever and however we locate that moment) on down. The fact that hedoesn’t quite succeed, or rather that the past remains with him as he movesinto that future, could be read as a failure or as ironic or etc.—but it couldalso be read as deeply human, as the intersection of the worst and best thatdefines us all, individuals and nations alike.

LastGatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What doyou think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?