HOW GREAT BOOKS ENDURE

By being taken into the arms of new generations: "Gatsby's green light beckons a new set of strivers."

Jinzhao’s teacher, Meredith Elliott, and other teachers at Boston Latin and other urban schools, say their students see in “Gatsby” glimmers of their own evolving identities and dreams. The students talk about the youthful characters — Gatsby; Daisy Buchanan, the married woman he loves; Tom, Daisy’s husband and a onetime Yale football star; and the narrator, Nick Carraway — as if they were classmates or celebrities.

Comments

[tod goldberg]

Today I taught the first day of a two day course on unreliable narrators and one of the first things I had the class read, unattributed on the photo copy, was the opening page of Gatsby. Of the 13 well read, well versed adults, some of whom have published, two emergening pen fellows, a former principal, a librarian, a journalism professors...not one recognized it. I was stunned. The average age of the class was, I'd say, 37.

[jh]

"She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock..."

The green light represents the diminished dream. It's small, hard to see, etc. Somebody isn't teaching them very well.

[Martha Southgate]

JH, Perhaps you had a perfect, absolutely mature understanding of everything you read in high school. But I sure didn't. Most of us start out being moved and coming to a deeper understanding of a rich piece of literature as we grow. Perhaps these kids will never understand "Gatsby" on every deepest level. But at least they're reading it now and loving it--and perhaps they will return to it later in life. I think that's a very, very important thing and their teachers deserve praise, not discouragement for not teaching it "right." You don't actually know how they're being taught it.

[Martha Southgate]

JH, Perhaps you had a perfect, absolutely mature understanding of everything you read in high school. But I sure didn't. Most of us start out being moved and coming to a deeper understanding of a rich piece of literature as we grow. Perhaps these kids will never understand "Gatsby" on every deepest level. But at least they're reading it now and loving it--and perhaps they will return to it later in life. I think that's a very, very important thing and their teachers deserve praise, not discouragement for not teaching it "right." You don't actually know how they're being taught it.

[j]

I think it is far more damaging to view Gatsby as a hopeful book (trying to relive the past, as we all know, is foolish), rather than a tragic one. That is mostly the point I was making.

[Rodger Jacobs]

I agree with J. Near the last graph of the article one of the students opines that "the journey toward the dream is the most important thing." One only has to recall Nick Carraway's depiction of his lunch with Gatsby and mobster Meyer Wolfsheim to realize how fallacious that assesment is.

"The Great Gatsby" is not, and was never intended to be, an inspirational novel. It is a perverse Horatio Alger tale that, among other things, reflects Fitzgerald's bitterness toward his own hard-won success.

[Rodger Jacobs]

at least they're reading it now and loving it

As the article indicates, Martha, it's required reading. The kids aren't going into book stores and libraries and voluntarily pulling "Gatsby" off the shelves.

[Peter Sutherland]

To suggest, as JH seems to, that Gatsby [the text] must be viewed as *either* hopeful or tragic is, I think, to present a false choice. (To say nothing of the ridiculousness in asserting that the book is being "taught wrong" b/c of an individual student's interpretation--a startling conclusion, which Martha S. has rightly debunked.)

If anything, the narrative (and its author's life) presents a decidedly conflicted outlook on matters of wealth and class and privilege; that is, if Fitzgerald sometimes imbues Nick Carraway with a condemnatory tone toward those around him--the rich and "careless," who could always retreat "back into their money"--he nonetheless betrays a not-insignicant fondness for Gatsby himself, in whose striving and aspiration there was "something gorgeous" and, rather telling given Fitzgerald's own well-known aesthetic inclinations, a "romantic readiness."

That Jay Gatsby eventually meets a "tragic" (and violent) end does not, one senses, undercut the inherent appeal of his character, of his ceaseless striving, for someone as romantic as Fitzgerald. To the contrary, a large measure of what makes such striving so appealing, so poignant and hopeful, is that it's carried out IN THE FACE OF the realization that life is, ultimately, a tragic endeavor, in that it's inevitably finite, and sprinkled (if one is lucky) with diappointments along the way. ("So we beat on. . .")

Accepting this, it's hard to believe that Fitzgerald envisioned the book primarily as a cautionary tale, or that, as JH posits, it's somehow "damaging to view Gatsby as a hopeful book. . ." James Gatz, after all, could have played it safe, stayed in the Middle West, sold feed-bags at a five-and-dime store, and avoided his early demise at the hands of George Wilson. If a preference for this path is the take-away that Fitzgerald intended, it doesn't come across. Indeed, at the risk of falling prey to an intentional fallacy [apologies for the critical jargon, which has turned off TEVers before; I"m trying to keep it at a minimum today], such a play-it-safe course seems about as far away as possible from the sensibilities of a self-described "romantic egoist."

Fitzgerald, of course, was by turns drawn to and repulsed by the moneyed class of his era, perhaps evidenced best during his stint at Princeton, during which his social successes--such as admission to the exclusive Cottage Club--never seemed to quell his feelings of inferiority, of being just on the outside of a rich man's institution.

Thus, it can hardly come as a surprise that his later depictions of this world were fraught with ambivalence and contradiction. And yet, despite these internal complications, it is still possible, I would argue, to extract from these texts a measure of hope and admiration for the striving itself, if not for the end-goal per se, that glittery ticket to the echelons of the "very rich," whose very domain, as Nick Carraway reports, is often anything but golden.

Cheers, Klipspringer

[j]

I am not criticizing Gatsby's ambition (if that came across, I apologize)--I am criticizing his compulsion to recreate the past, rather than imagine and move on. And while one could quibble with the significance of the green light, one cannot quibble with it's essential form: it is small, diminished. He may have believed in it, but it was still a fragment of what once was. To recap: ambition good, clinging harmfully to the past bad. And no, Peter, I'm not giving you your tennis shoes back.

[Peter Sutherland]

@J--

I appreciate your attempt at qualification, but with all due respect, I really couldn't disagree more.

Gatsby's "ambition," as you term it, is inextricably linked to his wanting something from the past: namely, Daisy. It is exactly this pursuit of Daisy (a figure from his past) that makes his illicit activities--dealings w/ Wolfsheim, people in Chicago, bootlegging, etc.--seem at least somewhat permissible, if not quite laudable, as they serve an ostensibly worthwhile end (i.e., getting the girl).

Would Gatsby be a better (or less "bad") figure if he'd engaged in these dealings solely to become rich, and had then "moved on" in the form of finding another girl--like, say, Gilda Gray's understudy, who turns up at one of his parties?

I would argue, instead, that it's Gatsby's romantic pursuit of Daisy--at once hopeful and tragic--that keeps his avid material accumulation, or outward ambition, from being hollow, as opposed to the other way around.

PS