Revisiting The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nobody came.

Sitting alone in the rain, “the holocaust complete,” the weight of revelation poured down upon Nick Carraway’s shoulders. Nobody came. Gatsby’s final party lacked a roaringly big band, flappers and bobs, high balls and Hollywood stars. Yet it was the first of his parties that entertained reality for the man who couldn’t escape his past, regardless of how hard he worked to create a new future. Sitting alone in the rain, Nick was the last uninvited guest to the last part ever held in honor of the Great Jay Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his finest work, one of the great works of the 20th century, with a redemptive understanding of human nature, distinct personality types, and a refined understanding of what was, and what sadly still is, the American Dream. The Great Gatsby is more than just an accurate portrayal of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age. It is the story of three people, mysteriously brought together, enveloped in events fated to end in only one conceivable way: tragedy.

And it is with the death of the Great Gatsby that our narrator, Nick Carraway, the moral compass of the novel, the only character who changes, understands what we as Americans need to amend today—the American Dream, to a dream centered on community and relationships above personal success and individual fulfillment surrounded by a white picket fence.

Till the very end, Gatsby, originally James Gatz, is an equivocal enigma. The majority of my annotations were questions regarding his moral character. Was he a man who had risen in the land of opportunity, or was he merely a shady bootlegger? Fitzgerald must have known Jay Gatsby, must have sat down several times to drinks, attended his parties. For Gatsby may be the most life-like of the many heroes found in American Literature. We close the final pages knowing Gatsby better than Ishmael; Huck is a child we knew at one time, but who no longer lives in our world today; Holden is too young to fall and fail in the way Gatsby eventually does. No, it is in Gatsby we most clearly see ourselves, most lucidly see our material dreams realized, and most painfully feel the bludgeoning of the unrequited love with the girl of our dreams.

Daisy Buchanan, in contrast, isn’t real, much like the allusion that personal fulfillment will truly be fulfilling. In Daisy, Gatsby chases a ghost, an apparition of what once was and what never could be again. If Fitzgerald knew anything, he knew first-hand the mirage of wealth and personal success outside of a real community. And it is for this reason that The Great Gatsby is as timely and tangible of a read today as it was in the 20s.

With the elections quickly approaching and candidates promising change, it is in the silencing death of Gatsby’s unspoken, unreachable dream that we see the need for a new national dream. We see the need for true friendship. We see the need to come together not as suits and gowns, titles and wealth, but as people of a common origin, as people in need of each other.

In the end, sitting on the front steps of West Egg’s finest estate, puddles catching the drops falling fittingly upon an hour needing cleansing and renewal, Nick waits for the cars to once again line the drive, for the crowds of people who eagerly attended each and every of Gatsby’s parties. Nobody came.

Fitzgerald leaves us silenced, sinking despondently low in whatever furniture holds us at the moment; yet Fitzgerald’s last act is something that will cause us to rise: closing the back page upon a novel that changes its readers, we are left with a vision. It is a vision where we clearly see the need to amend our American Dream; one where we look past the superficial linings, unreservedly embrace community, and finally become One People, One Nation, with One Dream. I can already see the cars lining the drive.

The Greatness of Gatsby is that he is real. He is in us all. Yet our hope rests in that Nick is real as well. And Nick Carraway even outlived the Great Jay Gatsby.