When writing “The Gift for Hope” for “Food for Thought: Essays on Mind and Spirit,” I approached “The Great Gatsby” from the concept of hope. The reason was Jay Gatsby modeled unbounded, albeit irrational, hope.
Although his deep-seated hope is what Nick Carraway, the story’s narrator, chiefly carries away when he thinks of Gatsby, he has another takeaway: Complete disgust with those that preyed upon him, even though Gatsby represents everything for which Nick has “an unaffected scorn.”
“No,” he says, “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
“The Great Gatsby” was published in 1925, and its themes and poignant messages are as timely a century later as they were then. Arguably, more so because there has never been a time in American history when the wealth gap has been greater.
We often look at the 1920s — the Roaring Twenties — through the lens of orgiastic partying, bootlegging, and debauchery. In the popular mind, flappers, speakeasies and Al Capone are the images of the decade. That hedonistic rendition, however, is incomplete. They were the excesses of the period, but not the full story by any means.
By depicting that era as a time of hope, F. Scott Fitzgerald captured one aspect of its ethos. The worldwide flu pandemic of 1918—their Covid—along with World War I had come to an end, and America turned inward. Narcissistic isolationism became the zeitgeist as the country retreated back behind her two-ocean moat.
Industry boomed, and the so-called Captains of Industry grew even more fabulously wealthy. They enjoyed nearly unlimited power. As their ideal president, Calvin — Silent Cal — Coolidge succinctly phrased it, “The business of America is business.”
The New York Stock Exchange went on steroids, and get-rich mania spread across the land. It seemed anyone with a dream wanted part of the action, although everyday Americans were pretty much left behind. Cut out of the action is a better way of putting it.
America increasingly becoming urbanized because it was in the cities where jobs — and potential wealth — were along with the nightlife. With a stake having been driven into the heart of the repressive Victorian Age, Americans started to let go. They began to show some skin.
Advances in technology were already changing the mores of American culture. Rapid communication — albeit a snail’s pace compared to today — were connecting Americans from coast to coast and networking them into a monoculture. Hollywood was beginning to rewrite the script of American literary methodology and culture.
But there was also a dark side. Behind the Roaring Twenties veneer, anger seethed. Rabid anti-immigrant fever ran hot. Racial segregation and ethnic dehumanization ruled. The KKK became even more powerful with its tentacles reaching far from its birthplace. Factory workers’ plights grew increasingly deplorable. Resentment, frustration, and disillusionment were becoming more heightened. Something had to give, and it did in October 1929.
There’s considerably more, but it can be plausibly posited the seeds of where we are and who we’ve become were sown in the 1920s.
It was in that context Fitzgerald wrote “The Great Gatsby.” Although primarily a story of delusional love in a dystopian culture of extreme wealth oblivious to the plight of everyday folks, the story effectively captures the essence of the period through its secondary characters and dialogue. It’s a grim picture. The dark mood is portrayed by the Valley of Ashes, the wasteland that separates the ultra-rich East Eggers from the rest of society. Fitzgerald describes it as a “fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat” and “men move dimly.” It symbolizes the culture’s moral depravity and ordinary peoples’ despair.
It’s a discomfiting, stark, brutally honest portrayal of Jazz Age America.
We’ve come far in cleaning up the literal air we breathe, though in many places, like large cities and rural communities near fracking wells, our once pristine air remains a diabolical health threat. Then there’s the social-political-cultural pollution and widespread disillusionment.
Near the end of the story, Nick, despite his effort to avoid Tom Buchanan, is accosted by him as he walks down Fifth Avenue. After their terse exchange, Nick concludes he couldn’t forgive or like him because Tom felt entirely justified for the havoc he wreaked. It’s then that Nick drives home the ugly truth of those like Tom and Daisy Buchanan. They smash things and creatures up, he says, retreat back into their money, vast carelessness, or whatever holds them together, and let others clean up the mess they made.
One hundred years later, I wonder what story Fitzgerald would write today, given that it seems eerily déjà vu all over again.
Jerry Fabyanic is the author of “Sisyphus Wins” and “Food for Thought: Essays on Mind and Spirit.” He lives in Georgetown.