Over the twentieth century, popular culture has emerged to play a central role in how Americans know themselves, and Gatsby established or developed many of the tropes that would be dominant in that culture. In fact, the universality of its ideas enabled the novel to enter even headier territory–American folklore.
- Bob Batchelor. “The Enduring Influence of The Great Gatsby.”
It has been almost a century since The Great Gatsby was first published. At first, it was seen as a disappointing follow-up to his successful debut and the Jazz Era defining, This Side of Paradise, but today, Gatsby has been elevated so high into the American psyche that readers shake their heads at those critics long ago. Fitzgerald’s greatest novel is so easily misinterpreted as cheap worship of a dead era of wealth and partying, while what readers should be looking at is how The Great Gatsby is rich in symbolism. Specifically, one of which is hardly ever talked about in classroom discussions: water. Maureen Corrigan, professor of English at Georgetown and author of So We Read On, writes that The Great Gatsby “may be our dampest exemplar of the Great American Novel. Fitzgerald didn’t just stick his toes in the water here; in this his most perfect meditation on the American dream and its deadly undertow, he dives in and goes for broke.” The American dream was not a coined term at the time Fitzgerald wrote the novel, and that makes the fact that he perfectly encapsulates it in narrative form so astonishing.
The Great American Novel was not a standard in the nation's history until nearly a century after its independence. It was not until 1868 that John William De Forest published his essay “The Great American Novel,” in which he argued for fiction to rises above and reflect American society over the popular romance novels of the time. Since America’s formation, its culture grew with no restraints, but there were yet to be any quintessential “American” novels by the late 19th century. De Forest hoped to change that. He wanted to create more than just a Great American Novel. He wanted to jump-start the development of an American canon that closely portrayed the complexity of national American character. The novels that were considered American enough to be a part of the elite Great American Novel canon in the 19th century are titles like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; both written around mid-century. After Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there is a bit of a drought for Great American Novels, until F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel; which granted, was not considered a Great American Novel until decades later when it achieved critical acclaim.
Some may argue when looking at Gatsby that it debunks the American Dream myth, but that is where the complexities of America and what we think of as "The American Dream" comes in. Corrigan says it well when she writes, “Not who we are; who we want to be. It’s that wanting that runs through every page of Gatsby, making it our Greatest American Novel.” The popularity of Gatsby is reminiscent of the popularity of Captain America. He represents not how America is, but who America wants to be.
Striving towards a strong idealism is within the novel because Fitzgerald dealt with that feeling his entire life. He strived to be great and liked as a young boy just like Jay Gatz, who dreamed of a better life away from poverty. After changing his name from Gatz to Gatsby, he ended up in the army during World War I, just like Fitzgerald. The difference is that Fitzgerald never made it overseas before the war ended. The fact that Gatsby does, and is decently successful, is a way for Fitzgerald to fix the shortcomings of his own life in literature. Another direct link between Fitzgerald’s life and The Great Gatsby is the romance between Gatsby and Daisy. When Fitzgerald was a young man in the army, he accidentally ended up at a party just like Gatsby does and fell for a wealthy daughter with many suitors. That young lady’s name was Zelda, but Fitzgerald first needed to prove to Zelda’s father he would be able to support her in a style she was accustomed to. Therefore, Scott went to New York; where many young dreamers go to prove that they can make it.
Throughout his life, Fitzgerald worked so hard to be liked and be the best at what he did, that he ended up failing out of Princeton because he was so concerned with his extracurricular activities. Where his efforts paid off was in writing and editing. The first version of the manuscript was very different than what ended up being The Great Gatsby, but thankfully his editor prompted changes. Corrigan describes this editing process in which “Fitzgerald made hundreds of such excisions and small shavings of a word or a phrase here and there.” This precise attention to every word trimmed down the manuscript into the beautiful flow of language that makes it so irresistible. Fitzgerald’s aim was to write something special, which was evident in a letter he wrote to his editor exactly one year before Gatsby was published, “In my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work—not trashy imagining as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world.” Readers will know how Fitzgerald used language to create the radiant world of 1920s New York and Long Island, but the sincerity is what sets it apart from his other work and the works of others.
Fitzgerald understood the darker side of American society and of people, and he displays these feelings in another letter he wrote to a fan that had kindly written about The Great Gatsby and wanted to move to New York. F. Scott included in his reply, “America’s greatest promise is that something is going to happen, and after a while, you get tired of waiting because nothing happens to people except that they grow old.” This could be seen as cynicism or just a reaction to what would become in later years The American Dream. The 1920s was a time of extravagance, but only for the privileged, and Fitzgerald saw an issue in that.
Apart from the emotional depth that was achieved in The Great Gatsby, its narration is an interesting part of its popularity. In her thorough analysis on all things Gatsby, Maureen Corrigan notes that the novel “is just about perfect despite the fact that it goes against every expectation of what a Great American Novel should be.” Fitzgerald tends to show in Gatsby instead of telling, which is the number one rule of what not to do when writing. But somehow showing works in The Great Gatsby because of the brilliant way that Fitzgerald uses language in a precise yet poetic way. Another interesting aspect of the narration is how Fitzgerald gives the narrative voice to Nick Carraway.
In his article on magnetic characters, Peter Shreve analyzes what makes a character magnetic, which then makes a story successful. Gatsby is a magnetic character, but at the same time is secondary and that, “There’s an argument for making Gatsby the point of view character, allowing us into his mind, into his past, behind his ‘pavilion’-sized curtains into his interior life.” If readers were allowed into the mind of Jay Gatz, the mysterious and haunting allure would be seen as the mask it is, and we would have nothing to believe in, besides a lie, and would take all away appeal that brings people back to The Great Gatsby again and again. Keeping readers at a distance from the dreaming Gatsby, as he is kept separate from his dream of Daisy, thus makes Nick the perfect narrator. Circling back to Corrigan’s point about how Gatsby goes against the standards the Great American Novel, the use of a narrator set away from much of the story, especially the backstory that gives depth to what Nick sees happen in theory should not work, and naturally, critics and readers alike did think so at first.
Sales for The Great Gatsby were not necessarily terrible, but they were not “great” after the success of his first novel. Laura Goldblatt analyzed the critical and political reasons why The Great Gatsby became such a national treasure. Comparing the thought of critics of the Cold War and critics during the book’s publication, she states, “These interests represent a different set of concerns from those of the 1920s and 1930s when reviewers and critics paid more attention to the book’s failed romance plot and evocations of criminalized consumerism. The critic’s attention to the failed romance plot and consumerism is not far from the point Fitzgerald was trying to get across. It is the illusion of the romance and Gatsby’s failure to realize he cannot regain his lost dream of the past that is the point. It is the enduring hope to always try and reach out over Long Island Sound for the dream. In her introduction to her novel about Gatsby, Maureen Corrigan corrects the common misinterpretation, “It’s not the green light; stupid, it’s Gatsby’s reaching for it that’s the crucial all-American symbol of the novel.” The green light is still a symbol, but it masks a much more important symbol that gives a richness to the novel.
After the old critics had set down the novel for good, a few decades later it was given new life. Unlike these old critics it was, “In the 40s and 50s, mid-century critics and readers gave Gatsby a second chance and were knocked out.” Taking time away from something can give a new perspective, but it is more complicated than that for The Great Gatsby. The first compilation of Fitzgerald’s work was published in 1945. The first novel based on him, The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg, was published in 1950. First essay collection and biography a year later in 1951. This was around the time that his work started to show up increasingly in anthologies, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The early 1950s was a good time for Gatsby, but its popularity would only escalate over the next couple decades when it became a part of the United States literary canon, a Great American Novel, and synonymous with the Great American Dream. Also, in her discussion of the novel and its relation to the American Dream, Laura Goldblatt writes, “During the 1950s and 1960s, New Critics and other formalists sought to safeguard high art from consumer and mass culture. In doing so they created an ‘ideal order of eternal objects’ that celebrated American art and civilization.” From the creation of high American culture, The Great Gatsby went from revived interest to cultural icon. The book also became a very common occurrence in classrooms and became not just part of our literary education, but a historical one because of its place in the American canon and American myth. It also does not hurt that it is short and packed full of symbolism.
If you weren't paying attention in your literature class in high school, water is an overarching symbol in the novel, but it is not the only one. Other symbols include temperature, geographical location, names, music, vision, vehicles, birds, color, and medieval-quest romances and mythology. But as for water, it can be seen everywhere from the body of water that separates Gatsby’s and Daisy’s homes to Gatsby’s pool, and the pouring rain on the day Daisy came to tea at Nick’s and reunited with Gatsby. It appears as ice on the hottest day of the summer that erupts in the climax, “because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice.” It was also pouring at Gatsby’s funeral. Fitzgerald uses water throughout the novel, and represents the nature of the American Dream in what Maureen Corrigan would call “Sink or Swim.” America is the land of opportunity, but if you do not make it, you will drown underneath those who are afloat on rafts of privilege.
In a highly underrated moment in The Great Gatsby, Nick tells readers about when James Gatz meets Dan Cody and became Jay Gatsby, “To young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, that yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world.” After Cody’s death, young Gatsby was left a portion of his fortune, but a more cunning swimmer took it from him. From that experience, young Gatsby learned the corrupt lesson that good swimming did not always mean playing by the books. Before finding his next captain, Gatsby spent time in the military and fell for the rich Daisy Fay. During the lunch that Gatsby invites him to, Nick meets Meyer Wolfsheim who after Nick asks how long he has known Gatsby replies, “Several years, I made the pleasure of his acquaintance just after the war.” Before meeting Daisy, Gatsby had, for the most part, tried to tread water honestly, but after the heartbreak of losing Daisy, he would become by whatever means necessary to be what he thought Daisy wanted.
Gatsby’s drive for an idealistic dream is what many critics would suggest is a not so subtle metaphor that Gatsby is a living and breathing embodiment of the American Dream, and looking at Gatsby’s life it makes sense and is arguably believable. The American mentality is to be the best and to be at the top; to always be striving to better ourselves and our lives for bigger and greater things. The way that Gatsby acts this out is clear in Corrigan’s description, “Gatsby reached out, strained the farthest, ran the fastest, trying to grasp something while everyone else in the novel was anesthetized by liquor or greedy self-regard.” That is why, even though Nick and readers do not necessarily have to fully approve of Gatsby, it cannot be helped to want to believe in him and his dream. An iconic line from the book comes from Nick’s last words to Gatsby, “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Nick is setting himself apart from the privileged upper-class society he has been living in and observing, and is suggesting that Gatsby, even though he has elevated into a high status, he is also set apart and at a higher moral status than the people around them. That Gatsby’s hard work and constant determination makes him a better person. However, like the novel’s late critical acclaim, the attribution of the American Dream came later as well.
The phrase itself did not exist until 1931. The mentality was around before it was coined; it probably affected earlier reviews of the books before American culture put a name to an emerging cultural phenomenon. Although, there is another way to look at the symbol of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby apart from Gatsby. Daisy Buchannan could also be a part of this symbol. In his chapter on The Great Gatsby in his book about classic American novels, Joyce Rower writes about Gatsby’s dream, “his vision represents a kind of aestheticized materialism—the pursuit of a grail which conjoins wealth and power with all the beauty, vitality, and wonder of the world, which he incarnates in the fragile loveliness of the rich, well-born American girl.” Daisy is what Gatsby dreams of, but what he builds up in his mind is only an illusion and something he can never achieve. Therefore, does this mean that the American Dream is unattainable? Perhaps not, but it can also be considered that Gatsby is not the only part of American cultural mentality.
Nick can often be a character that is overlooked as well, He is shadowed by Gatsby and even others like Daisy or even Jordan Baker, despite being the narrator. Gatsby and Nick placed next to each other foil each other and create a combined symbol of America. Joyce Rowe touches on this; “If Gatsby is the ideal national self, Nick is the more pragmatic social self—two sides of the same coin of American consciousness.” Fitzgerald’s choice to make Nick the narrator is supported by how including Nick’s inner thoughts is giving readers more than the ideal side of America and makes the novel more substantial. Americans can be idealistic, but there is also a need and necessity for practicality. To make matters even more complicated, there are some critics, like Peter Hays, that suggests that Gatsby is more than one side of American idealism:
"I have difficulty crediting Gatsby as a coherent human being, but as a symbol of the elusive American dream, I find him perfect. He consummately embodies the contradictory qualities of this country, our saying one thing while doing another, our clinging to myths that have little basis in reality. As a well-behaved, socially conscious crook, he is a paradox, an oxymoron, and an exemplary American."
From this, it could be said that Gatsby is not just the American Dream, but also the whole of America, or at least how Fitzgerald saw it in the mid-1920s. However, when looking at Gatsby and the other characters in Gatsby it can be seen that many of them have multiple layers like an onion. Outwardly, Gatsby is, “someone who looked like he had killed a man, and a very proper and timid individual on social and sexual matters.” A good example of the layers of Gatsby is a scene in the 2013 adaptation when Gatsby takes Nick to lunch and they run into Tom Buchanan. Gatsby is trying to show Nick that he is a successful man worthy to be with Daisy by taking him to a speakeasy inside a barbershop, and is across the street from a shady restaurant supposedly connected to criminal activities. However, when Tom appears, Gatsby turns his face away because he is caught off guard and becomes James Gatz for a moment, and has to mentally regain focus to put back on his Gatsby face before facing Tom.
Over the decades of its popularity, The Great Gatsby has been reproduced within the confines of changing times, while also being a reproduction of an idolized era of the past. Film adaptations can be seen as a sort of paradox, to which Batchelor writes, “Over time the novel has taken on new meaning for contemporary audiences, while simultaneously drawing us back to a vanishing era in American history, which can be mechanically reproduced in film and television, but in reality becomes more distant by the moment.” Directors such as Buz Luhrmann’s most recent adaptation in 2013, there is a necessity of recreating the 1920s setting that is so fundamental to the novel, but there is also a need to modernize it as to reflect the audience of the time. Readers and their culture have been influencing The Great Gatsby as much as it has influenced audiences. One of the ways that Luhrmann updates his film for audiences is to include Hip Hop music, some of which is fused with 1920s music, creating a strange yet intriguing aesthetic.
However, some critics oppose the idea of modernizing the novel for film, “The novel is impossible to film or stage because its power is so dependent, not on plot or character, but on language.” Perhaps the reason why each of the film adaptations is so different is not just because they reflect the time in which they were created, but also because they are simply trying to recreate the written word into a visual film. What Corrigan suggests makes sense when thinking about what makes the novel work the way it does. Without the poetic language it would not be the great American Novel celebrated as it is, but with a great book always comes the desire to be able to “see” it and this is why film adaptations will never stop being made.
From the 2013 film, it does seem like Luhrmann is conscious of the fact that he is trying to tell an old story to modern audiences. One example comes right at the beginning of the film with the title sequences that first appears in black and white, but then transforms in front of the audience's eyes to color and becomes 3D, showing the endurance of the story to cross multiple decades. Another element that Luhrmann takes liberty is the first shot of the film, which is the green light. Audiences are shown the light before we are told what or where it is, and that it separates Gatsby and Daisy’s homes. It is such an iconic image that it can be the first image of the film and people will automatically know what it is. A film being visual rather than textual, Luhrmann adds more reasoning behind why Nick writes down and tells the story two years later. At the start of the film audiences are shown Nick in a sanitarium, and as part of his treatment, which audiences infer is because of what happened with Gatsby, he is told to write Gatsby’s story down. Mirroring the beginning sequence, the credits at the end of the film fade back ceaselessly into the past to black and white.
There are a few major changes that Luhrmann makes that have a significant effect on the portrayal of the original text. Take, for instance, the advice Nick’s father gives him in the opening of both the novel and the 2013 film. In the novel, it is, “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.” While in the movie it is changed to, “Always try and see the best in people.” The novel is set up by this advice to be about class in America. The change in the film takes the focus from class to be more humanistic, while the rest of the film still has a strong element of class. The element of class in The Great Gatsby is not something that can be taken out or changed by changing the advice at the beginning and is one of the shortcomings of the 2013 film. Another change that was made in the film was Jordan Baker’s character. In the movie she has does not have a relationship with Nick like she does in the book, which takes away opportunities for audiences to see the faults in Nick Carraway. Also, the scene in the book where Jordan is driving is instead given to Tom and a little bit to Gatsby.
A difference that is even more damaging is the exclusion of Gatsby’s father and Owl Eyes from Gatsby’s funeral. In an article on the differences between the novel and film, it reiterates that, “Gatsby is, in both versions, lonely in death, but the film is even crueler to him in this regard, dropping the last-minute appearance of his father and the unexpected arrival at the funeral of a man who Nick previously met in Gatsby’s study.” It is so infuriating that these characters are left out at the end. Luhrmann may have made this decision to show the tragedy of Gatsby’s failed dream, and that Nick had a nervous breakdown because he was the only one that cared, but that is not a good enough reason, because what Gatsby’s father and Owl Eyes bring to the story is that someone did care. Gatsby’s dad coming shows that James Gatz mattered no matter what he made of himself. He is the quintessential supportive parent. Owl Eyes coming shows that Jay Gatsby mattered whether he was an illusion or not.
Without loss of illusion in The Great Gatsby, it would ultimately be uninteresting, and would not fit into being a Great American novel. In a column of The New York Times, Cheryl Strayed writes that “Perhaps what drives these books, and drives us to read them again and again, is the incurable idealism about America that we all secretly cherish, and which is continually disappointed by reality.” When we live in a world dominated by illusionary entertainment, what can be the most engaging is the shock of reality. The American Dream is a myth and can never be achieved to the fullest extent, and all shortcomings appear like a disappointment. However, everyone will still go on dreaming, for which, “Nick’s epilogue provides us with an elegy for Gatsby—and by extension our own dreaming selves—which keeps alive the very form of that aspiration we have seen issuing in a wasteland of social and moral emptiness.” In a way, The Great Gatsby is an avenue for readers to engage with Gatsby’s dream as their own dream, and see the inner workings of the complex cultural mentally of America. As Nick says of Gatsby, Fitzgerald was also alright in the end. His work fell out of popularity and acclaim before his death but became one of the most well-known and revered authors of the 20th century.
*adapted from Senior thesis, so some weird wordiness may occur.
Sources
Batchelor, Bob. “The Enduring Influence of The Great Gatsby.” Journal of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era. 14.1 (2015): 121-126. Web.
Bruccoli, Michael J., ed. A Life in Letters. New York: Scribner's, 1994. Print.
Corrigan, Maureen. So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2014. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.
Goldblatt, Laura. “Can’t Repeat the Past? Gatsby and the American Dream at Mid-Century.” Journal of American Studies. 50.1 (2016): 105-124. Web.
Haglund, David. “How Faithful is The Great Gatsby.” Slate. 9 May 2013. Web. 25 April 2016.
Hays, Peter. “Oxymoron in ‘The Great Gatsby’.” Papers on Language & Literature. 47.3 (2011): 318-325. Web.
Rowe, Joyce A. “Closing the Circle: The Great Gatsby.” Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 100-126. Print.
Shreve, Peter. “The Magnetic Character.” The Writer’s Chronicle. 48.5 (2016) 61-70. Print.
Strayed, Cheryl and Adam Kirsch. “Why are We Obsessed With The Great American Novel?” The New York Times. 13 Jan 2015. Web. 24 April 2016.
The Great Gatsby. Dir. Buz Luhrmann. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio, Toby Maguire, and Carey Mulligan. Warner Brothers, 2013. Film.