Fitzgerald Masterpiece on American dream: NPR

The Grand Gatsby – 100 years? How can it be? To borrow the words that F. Scott Fitzgerald used to describe New York in the 1920s, The big Gatsby has “all the irritization of the beginning of the world”.

The main characters of the novel are young in a restless America reveling in the excess of the new modern age – an age whose anxieties have resurfaced with a new intensity at our own moment.

Great works of art are great, in part, because they continue to have something to say to the present day: they are both fine and timeless. And, my boy, made Gatsby Have something to say to us in 2025.

Recall that the novel takes place in the summer of 1922 in Long Island and New York – a city which was then the Center for Contemporary Debates on the threat of foreign influences, what is called racial “pollution” and the ascent of the “new woman” liberated, embodied in the novel by the professional golfer, Jordan Baker.

New York after the Second World War had been transformed by the second colossal wave of immigrants, mainly from Eastern and South Europe, which had started to pour into the city in the late 1880s. In 1920, only 1 million of the 6 million residents of the city were white Protestants born in the country.

There was also a massive internal migration at the time: black Americans moved rural areas from southern to cities like Chicago, Detroit and New York. No wonder, then, that Tom Buchanan – this coarse and intimidating incarnation of white, male and old privilege – presents itself in the chapter one of the novels by bringing out ideas of a popular book on eugenics that he has read:

“Civilization goes in pieces. …” (insists on Tom)

“(I) f we do not look at that the white breed will be – will be completely overwhelmed. These are all scientific things; It has been proven. ”

In addition to ruminating how the promise of America could or should be extended to include immigrants, women and people of color, The Grand Gatsby is also freshly topical because it is our great American novel about the class. All the other main pretenders – and I think of books like Huckleberry Finn,, Moby Dick,, Beloved – Highlight the race question.

The compressed geography of Long Island and New York – made mythical in the novel – allowed Fitzgerald of speed its characters by the egg of the East High Class to Wannabee West Egg and to pass the valley of the working class of ashes to explore the limits of the American dream of social mobility.

Fitzgerald himself said that his novel focused on “aspiration”. But the aspiration does not guarantee success. Remember that Jay Gatsby, the character who is trying, who stretches his arms in this green light and all that he represents, died at the beginning of this retrospective story.

No surprise, then, that The Grand Gatsby was and continued to be on lists of contested books and withdrawn from school libraries while our frenzy of books prohibited. Blame everything to drink, extramarital sex and a doubt that hides on the meritocratic promise of America.

But the banners do not read the novel carefully enough. For, even if The Grand Gatsby Tells us that the American dream can be a mirage, it does it in some of the most beautiful languages ​​that we have ever written on America, in particular the last seven pages of the novel where Nick Carraway talks about the “research” of man for “something proported to his ability to amaze”. As a former wise student says once on The Grand Gatsby“It is the chapel of literature on 185 pages.”

Fitzgerald would be amazed to know that the celebrations of Gatsby The centenary takes place in the world this year. The novel was largely forgotten at the time of his death in Hollywood in 1940 at the age of 44. At the time, copies inserted from the first edition of Gatsby always gathered dust in the scribner warehouse.

Fitzgerald would also be amazed that The Grand Gatsby was one of the most read novels in American high schools; Indeed, it may be one of the few things that unites us. At the risk of resembling a Killjoy, I hope that everyone abandons these roaring festivals and, instead, celebrate the 100th of Gatsby by reading or rereading this incomparable novel about the troubled dream of America.