Amid the considerable history of American literature, one of the most significant has to be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, original and evergreen. While there are countless works that have affected culture at large outside the US, here in America, The Great Gatsby must be referred to multiple times as “The Great American Novel.” As such, it becomes a claim difficult to sustain. It is the novel’s deep resonance with themes central to the American experience itself, its rendering of a generative moment in history, its enduring symbolism, and its soaring prose. Most importantly, the novel endures because it encompasses the hopes and disappointments that form the center of the American Dream.
It is one of the most intriguing components of The Great Gatsby and establishes the conditions under which his readership gets as to why the book is as popular as it has become: It represents the American Dream. The book portrays a man named Jay Gatsby, who creates himself out of a simple farm child called James Gatz into a rich and mysterious individual who occupies a massive estate on Long Island. Gatsby’s story is, on the outside, one of rags to riches—one that stamps the American dream where anyone can become successful with sheer hard work and company. But Fitzgerald belittles this ideal with his expose on the emptiness behind Gatsby’s tinsel facade. Gatsby cannot buy acceptance into the social elite, nor his love for Daisy Buchanan through his wealth. His dream, based on illusions and materialism, leads to his downfall. Through Gatsby, Fitzgerald comments on the realities of how the American Dream had by then been sullied by greed and superficiality.
The Great Gatsby establishes for itself an equally significant appreciation as a classic American novel, and above all, the subsequent aspect is the mood of the novel. Jazz Age is one when the American economy was booming and being altered enormously with radical changes in its culture and shift of moral values after World War I. Fitzgerald captures the mood of the Roaring Twenties with descriptions of extravagant wealth, passionate parties, and frantic city life. These were characteristics of intoxication on consumerism and decadence but without inner satisfaction. At once glittering and hollow, Fitzgerald’s world is like the ultimate metaphor to which many Americans ran during that time. Such is why this novel makes fun reading and impressive commentary about its time, still very true today.
One of the reasons the novel has been appreciated through generations is the rich symbolism in it and the artistic beauty of the writing. Fitzgerald’s prose attains poetic heights and elegance. Its imagery is indeed far beyond realism. For example, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is one of the most enduring symbols in American literature. They are Gatsby’s hopes and visions, always so near and yet never graspable, and, by extension, the entire picture of the American Dream as such. These are forever in the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, who look out from the desolate “valley of ashes,” one omnipresent reminder of the withering and loss of spirituality in an industrialized world.
The influence of the novel and its legacy have indeed contributed to the claims of the novel as “The Great American Novel.” The Great Gatsby has entered American schools and classrooms for discussion and curriculum since its publication in 1925. The novel has been adapted into films, plays, and innumerable cultural references, embedding it into the national consciousness. It didn’t sell well commercially when it came out, but has gained stature with the decades, coming to be recognized as a definitive piece of American literature. From ambition to identity to love, class, and the pursuit of happiness, its themes are universal and timely, thus
ensuring that every new generation finds meaning in its text.
That “Great American Novel” then leapfrogs all definitions and brings us because it is more than beautiful writing; it is the quintessential investigation into the American ideal, a reflection the country will hold up to a certain, if not great, moment in its history, and an eternal thinking about the human condition. Everything historical insight, where the symbolic depth, or emotional resonance, can make it uniquely “The Great American Novel,” justifies calling it that. Of all such discourses that form the entire body of American literature, seldom do works achieve that elegance and hold power as these capture the soul of the nation.
