The Counterfeit Coin of the Realm: Gatsby, Populism, and the Political Performance of the Self-Made Man
📚 Academic Details
📝 Assignment Details
📊 Document Statistics (QuillBot Analysis)
📑 Table of Contents
- Abstract
- Keywords
- Research Question
- Hypothesis
- Introduction: The Autogenetic Illusion and the Populist Crisis
- I. The Political Economy of the Dream: From Producerism to the Performative Parvenu
- II. Horatio Alger in the Jazz Age: The Diminishment of the Pristine Dream
- III. The Architecture of Exclusion: Tom Buchanan and the Nativist Gatekeepers
- IV. The "Foul Dust" and the Historical Inevitability of Failure
- V. The Valley of Ashes as the Graveyard of Producerism
- VI. The Commodification of the Self and the "Hustle"
- VII. Political Assassination by Proxy: The Execution of the Parvenu
- Conclusion: The Terminal Exhaustion of the Autogenetic Myth
- Works Cited
Abstract
This paper undertakes a rigorous political and cultural analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), arguing that Jay Gatsby's autogenetic performance of selfhood constitutes a historically situated political crisis rather than a mere psychological pathology. By contextualizing the novel within nineteenth-century populist political economy, the nativist "tribal twenties," and the evolving scholarly critique of the Horatio Alger success myth, this analysis demonstrates that Gatsby's inevitable destruction is not the product of individual moral failure but the systemic foreclosure of egalitarian possibility by entrenched monopolistic capital. Drawing upon the scholarship of Thomas Goebel, Jeffrey Louis Decker, Kenneth S. Lynn, John Fraser, Suzanne Ferriss, and Laura Goldblatt, the paper reveals the novel as a definitive autopsy of the American populist imagination.
Keywords
Autogenesis, Populism, Self-Made Man, Producerism, Performative Identity, Monopolistic Capitalism, Nativism, Parvenu, Success Myth, Tribal Twenties, Political Economy, And Gatekeeping.
Research Question
Does Jay Gatsby's failure in The Great Gatsby represent a personal moral collapse, or does it expose a structural, historically inevitable crisis in American populist ideology -- the fundamental incompatibility of egalitarian aspiration with monopolistic capitalism?
Hypothesis
Gatsby's autogenetic persona is not a psychological pathology but a historically situated political performance -- a symptom of the terminal crisis of American populism. Because legitimate producerist pathways to success had been monopolized by the old-money elite by the 1920s, Gatsby could only perform upward mobility through criminality and imitation, making him, by structural necessity, a counterfeit in the economy of the American Dream.
Introduction: The Autogenetic Illusion and the Populist Crisis
In the American literary imagination, no figure looms larger over the etiology of the "American Dream" than F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Yet, a century after its publication, the critical apparatus surrounding The Great Gatsby (1925) frequently calcifies the text into a simplistic moral fable regarding the corruption of pure aspiration by materialistic greed. To extricate the novel from this reductive binary requires a rigorous re-examination of Gatsby's "Platonic conception of himself" -- not merely as a psychological pathology, but as a deeply fraught, historically situated political performance. Jay Gatsby's persona, a meticulously curated simulacrum of aristocratic leisure grafted onto the energetic chassis of a working-class striver, embodies the terminal crisis of American populism in the early twentieth century.
By examining Gatsby's meteoric rise and inevitable fall through the lenses of nineteenth-century populist political economy, the nativist gatekeeping of the "tribal twenties," and the evolving scholarly critique of the success myth, this paper argues that Gatsby's performance of self-making ultimately reveals the fundamental incompatibility of egalitarian populist ideals with the entrenched oligarchic realities of modern American capitalism.
Fitzgerald writes a protagonist who insists upon his own autogenesis: "he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself" (Fitzgerald). However, this autogenesis operates as a necessary political camouflage. The historical trajectory of the United States, from a localized agrarian republic to a centralized industrial empire, necessitated a corresponding evolution in its mythologies of success. As Thomas Goebel meticulously outlines in his analysis of American political development, the political economy of nineteenth-century populism was inherently antimonopoly, grounded in the moral superiority of the "producer" against the parasitic accumulations of the financier class (Goebel 112). By the 1920s, however, the structural avenues for such producerist success had been thoroughly monopolized by an entrenched elite, epitomized in Fitzgerald's text by the sprawling, inherited hegemony of Tom and Daisy Buchanan.
Consequently, the "self-made man" could no longer ascend through honest, tangible production; he had to perform his ascent through the illicit, invisible machinations of the shadow economy, adopting the aesthetic markers of the very leisure class that sought to exclude him. Gatsby, therefore, is the populist hero inverted by the pressures of monopolistic capitalism. His tragedy is not simply that he wants the wrong things, but that the historical moment requires him to become a counterfeit in order to participate in the economy of the American Dream at all. The "foul dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams" (Fraser 554) is the inescapable detritus of history itself: the realization that the populist fantasy of the self-made man is, by the 1920s, an obsolete narrative weaponized against the very individuals it supposedly empowers.
I. The Political Economy of the Dream: From Producerism to the Performative Parvenu
To decode Gatsby's performance, one must first delineate the shifting tectonic plates of American populist ideology that precede his arrival in West Egg. In "The Political Economy of American Populism from Jackson to the New Deal," Thomas Goebel notes that the late-nineteenth-century populist movement represented a profound, systemic challenge to the rise of corporate capitalism (Goebel 109). The central tenet of this ideology was rooted in a labor theory of value: wealth rightfully belonged to those who produced it through physical toil, primarily the agrarian yeoman and the industrial artisan. Conversely, the populist rhetoric deeply vilified the "non-producers" -- bankers, monopolists, and aristocratic inheritors -- who extracted wealth through speculative manipulation rather than legitimate creation.
Fitzgerald brilliantly subverts this populist paradigm in The Great Gatsby. If the traditional populist hero is defined by his transparent, sweat-equity contribution to the nation's material reality, Gatsby is defined by his profound detachment from it. James Gatz of North Dakota begins as a recognizable, albeit impoverished, figure of the agrarian landscape. Yet, his transformation into Jay Gatsby requires the complete obliteration of this producerist identity. He does not create a commodity; he creates a persona. His wealth is entirely unmoored from the agrarian earth; it is synthesized in the dark, speculative voids of Prohibition-era bootlegging and the fraudulent bond manipulations orchestrated by Meyer Wolfsheim.
Here, Fitzgerald illustrates a crucial mutation in the political economy of success. The populist ideal of the self-made man, a figure whose economic independence guarantees his political virtue, has been rendered impossible by the closed, monopolistic system over which figures like Tom Buchanan preside. Buchanan, possessing "a string of polo ponies" and wealth so vast it borders on the absurd, represents the triumph of the non-producer. Because legitimate avenues of upward mobility are structurally blockaded by the old-money oligarchy, Gatsby can only breach the citadel of wealth through criminality.
Thus, Gatsby's performance of the self-made man becomes deeply ironic. He must utilize the corrupt, speculative tools of the monopolist to achieve the financial velocity necessary to masquerade as an aristocrat. His extravagant parties, his "circus wagon" of a car, and his meticulously curated library of uncut books are all elements of a desperate, performative populism. He democratizes luxury, opening his mansion to the masses, yet he remains fundamentally isolated. He embodies the paradox of the modern American striver: to succeed in an unequal system, one must abandon the moral framework of the producer and master the aesthetic deceptions of the elite. Gatsby is a populist in origin and desire, but a monopolist in method, trapped in a historical epoch that demands the performance of wealth while denying the legitimacy of its acquisition.
II. Horatio Alger in the Jazz Age: The Diminishment of the Pristine Dream
The psychological scaffolding of Gatsby's performance relies heavily on the cultural ubiquitousness of the Horatio Alger myth, a narrative template that Fitzgerald systematically deconstructs. In The Dream of Success: A Study of the Modern American Imagination, Kenneth S. Lynn traces how the post-Civil War era codified the formula of the impoverished, virtuous youth ascending to respectable bourgeois status through "pluck and luck" (Lynn 6-8). The Alger myth functioned as a potent ideological tool, pacifying class resentment by insisting that capitalism provided boundless opportunities for the morally upright individual.
However, by the publication of The Great Gatsby in 1925, during the height of the Jazz Age, this paradigm had suffered a fatal exhaustion. Jeffrey Louis Decker, in his seminal article "Gatsby's Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties," forcefully argues that Fitzgerald's novel operates as a profound eulogy for the Algeric mythos. Decker posits that the 1920s marked a period of intense "tribalism" and nativist anxiety, wherein the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment actively sought to curtail the social and economic mobility of new immigrants and the lower classes (Decker 52-54). In this hostile environment, the traditional narrative of the self-made man was no longer celebrated as a testament to democratic vitality; instead, it was viewed with deep suspicion, coded as the threatening encroachment of the "parvenu."
James Gatz's boyhood schedule, written in the back of a copy of Hopalong Cassidy, is a heart-rending artifact of this obsolete Algeric faith. The schedule, detailing time allotted for "Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling," "Study electricity," and the resolution to "No wasting time at Shafters," is a direct invocation of Benjamin Franklin's rigorous autogenetic self-improvement, the foundational text of American self-making. Yet, Fitzgerald situates this artifact not as a blueprint for legitimate success, but as the poignant relic of a doomed boy. The tragedy, as Decker and Lynn both implicitly suggest, is that moral rigor and physical discipline are utterly impotent against the structural forces of the 1920s economy.
Gatsby realizes, consciously or otherwise, that the Alger formula is a trap designed to keep the working class laboring in the Valley of Ashes. George Wilson, the exhaust-dusted garage owner, is the novel's true Algeric figure. He works diligently, obeys the law, and believes in the system. Consequently, he is crushed by it. Gatsby's "pristine dream" survives only because he abandons the mandated moral strictures of the success myth while retaining its ferocious ambition. He performs the end result of the Alger myth -- immense wealth and social standing -- while entirely bypassing the prescribed, producerist journey.
This performative bypass deeply unsettles the established order. Tom Buchanan's immediate, visceral hatred of Gatsby stems from his recognition that Gatsby's performance exposes the arbitrary, unearned nature of Buchanan's own status. When Tom launches his "investigation" into Gatsby's affairs, sneering that Gatsby is a "bootlegger" who bought a chain of drug stores, he is not merely acting out of romantic jealousy; he is acting as the enforcer of the tribal elite, defending the gates against a populist interloper who refuses to know his place. Gatsby's diminishment is therefore politically mandated. The self-made man of the 1920s cannot be allowed to succeed, because his success, achieved outside the sanctioned boundaries of inheritance, reveals the entire economic hierarchy to be a violent, exclusionary fiction.
III. The Architecture of Exclusion: Tom Buchanan and the Nativist Gatekeepers
If Jay Gatsby embodies the performative desperation of the disenfranchised populist, Tom Buchanan stands as the ideological and physical fortification of the monopolistic elite. The conflict between these two men transcends the immediate romantic contest for Daisy; it is a profound clash of political economies, exacerbated by the virulent cultural anxieties of what Jeffrey Louis Decker terms the "tribal twenties" (Decker 53). Decker's analysis of The Great Gatsby situates the novel squarely within a decade characterized by intense xenophobia, eugenics rhetoric, and the systematic legislative foreclosure of the American border. In this reactionary climate, the traditional, democratic celebration of the "self-made man" was inverted into a profound suspicion of the "parvenu" -- the upwardly mobile interloper whose obscure origins were inherently threatening to the established Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony.
Fitzgerald establishes Tom Buchanan not merely as an arrogant inheritor, but as the active, violent enforcer of this nativist gatekeeping. Tom's physical description -- his "cruel body" and his "arrogant eyes [that] had established dominance over his face" (Fitzgerald) -- serves as a corporeal manifestation of entrenched, unyielding capital. However, it is his intellectual posturing that explicitly reveals the nativist anxiety underpinning his social dominance. Tom's obsessive endorsement of "'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man Goddard," a thinly veiled allusion to Lothrop Stoddard's fiercely white supremacist 1920 tract, functions as the theoretical justification for his oligarchy. As Decker points out, Tom's anxiety regarding the "submersion" of the white race is inextricably linked to his anxiety regarding class boundaries (Decker 54). For the old-money elite, the populist ascension of men like Gatsby is rhetorically conflated with the encroachment of non-white or immigrant populations; both represent a catastrophic dilution of the established order.
Consequently, Gatsby's meticulously constructed persona is uniquely vulnerable to Tom's nativist inquisition. Because legitimate avenues of capital accumulation are monopolized, Gatsby is forced to circumvent the establishment by aligning himself with the ultimate outsider: Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim, the Jewish racketeer who "played with the faith of fifty million people" by fixing the 1919 World Series (Fitzgerald), represents the complete subversion of the American populist ideal. By partnering with Wolfsheim, Gatsby irreparably taints his "pristine dream." He cannot claim the moral high ground of the Horatio Alger hero; his wealth is permanently stained by its association with the ethnic underclass and the illicit shadow economy.
"I suppose the latest thing is to let mr. nobody from nowhere make love to your wife." -- Tom Buchanan, The Great Gatsby
When Tom confronts Gatsby in the Plaza Hotel, he explicitly wields this nativist architecture to demolish Gatsby's performance. Tom does not merely attack Gatsby's morality; he attacks his ontological legitimacy. Tom's use of "nobody from nowhere" is a targeted political epithet. It strips Gatsby of his painstakingly acquired Oxford pedigree and his pink suits, reducing him back to James Gatz, the landless, disenfranchised agrarian. In the tribal twenties, the self-made man who attempts to perform his way into the upper echelon is violently reminded that success is no longer a matter of individual enterprise, but of pre-ordained bloodlines and inherited geography.
IV. The "Foul Dust" and the Historical Inevitability of Failure
To fully apprehend the tragedy of Gatsby's populist performance, one must turn to the specific vernacular of his demise. Nick Carraway famously concludes that Gatsby "turned out all right at the end," and that 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" (Fitzgerald). The critical tendency to interpret this "foul dust" purely as the corrosive influence of the Buchanans' materialism is insufficient. John Fraser, in his rigorously unsentimental essay "Dust and Dreams and The Great Gatsby," argues that Fitzgerald's narrative relies on a sleight of hand that deliberately diminishes the scope of historical American ambition to elevate Gatsby's fundamentally shallow, "Hollywood" aspirations (Fraser 564).
Fraser's critique is vital because it challenges the inherent nobility of Gatsby's enterprise. Fraser notes that by projecting a "capacity for wonder" onto a figure whose ultimate goal is the acquisition of a shallow socialite and a mansion, Fitzgerald implies that "the errors in his idealizings are historically inevitable" (Fraser 564). If we synthesize Fraser's critique with the political economy of populism, the "foul dust" ceases to be an external contaminant and becomes the very medium of Gatsby's era. The historical inevitability of Gatsby's failure is not simply that Daisy is unworthy of his romantic devotion, but that the structural conditions of 1920s America render any pure, producerist manifestation of the American Dream impossible.
The "foul dust" is the residual waste of monopolistic capitalism. It is the literal and metaphorical ash that blankets the Valley of Ashes, the purgatorial space between the soaring aspirations of the city and the entrenched wealth of the Eggs. Here, Fitzgerald buries the traditional populist hero. George Wilson is the genuine producer, the mechanic who attempts to build a life through honest labor within the prescribed rules of the system. His reward is to be coated in the foul dust of his betters' exhaust fumes. Gatsby's tragic flaw, therefore, is his epistemological blindness; he believes he can transcend this dust through the sheer velocity of his performance.
As Laura Goldblatt observes in her analysis of the novel's mid-century reception, the American Dream functions as a "complex utopian structure" that is characterized by its "immanent corruptibility" (Goldblatt 124). Gatsby's desire to "repeat the past" is essentially a utopian desire: a wish to return to a pre-monopolistic, localized Eden where a man's worth was commensurate with his capacity to love and produce. Yet, as Goldblatt's framework suggests, this utopia is inherently corruptible because the past Gatsby wishes to repeat -- his initial romance with Daisy in Louisville -- was already structured by the very class hierarchies he is trying to escape. The past was never pure; the dream was always compromised by the material realities of those who controlled the capital.
V. The Valley of Ashes as the Graveyard of Producerism
To fully grasp the political mechanics of Gatsby's downfall, the analysis must return to the geographical and economic center of the novel's conflict: the Valley of Ashes. This desolate tract of land operates as far more than a mere symbol of moral decay; it is the literal and ideological graveyard of nineteenth-century American producerism. If, as Thomas Goebel argues, the populist political economy rested upon the moral sanctification of physical labor and the equitable distribution of its fruits, the Valley of Ashes represents the grotesque subversion of that ideal by monopolistic industrialism (Goebel 115). Here, labor does not produce wealth for the laborer; it produces an inescapable, blinding byproduct -- the "foul dust" -- that coats the workers themselves, rendering them indistinguishable from the industrial waste they navigate.
George Wilson is the ultimate victim of this structural betrayal. He operates as the dark mirror to the Horatio Alger myth outlined by Kenneth S. Lynn. Wilson possesses all the requisite virtues of the Algeric hero: he is hardworking, morally earnest, and desperate to improve his station through legitimate commerce. Yet, in the monopolistic economy of the 1920s, his producerist virtues guarantee his subjugation. He is effectively held hostage by Tom Buchanan, relying on the aristocrat's capricious promise to sell him a car -- a transaction that Tom dangles entirely to maintain dominance and facilitate his affair with Myrtle Wilson.
Gatsby's relationship to this space is inherently contradictory and politically fraught. As James Gatz, he intuitively recognized the fatal trap of legitimate labor in a monopolized system, which is precisely why he abandoned the agrarian Midwest. By transforming into Jay Gatsby and embracing the performative "hustle" analyzed by Suzanne Ferriss, he attempts to soar directly over the Valley of Ashes, utilizing the illicit wealth of the shadow economy to bypass the exploited working class entirely (Ferriss). However, the architecture of the novel violently rejects this bypass. The catastrophic collision that kills Myrtle Wilson occurs precisely within this industrial purgatory, forcefully tethering Gatsby's speculative, airborne performance back to the brutal, material realities of the laboring class he attempted to transcend.
VI. The Commodification of the Self and the "Hustle"
Because the traditional avenues of the self-made man are foreclosed, Gatsby is forced to adapt to the new economic reality: the transition from an economy of production to an economy of speculation and spectacle. Suzanne Ferriss, in "Refashioning the Modern American Dream," draws a compelling lineage from Gatsby to the modern, hyper-capitalist protagonists of films like The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle. Ferriss argues that these narratives highlight a profound shift wherein the American Dream is no longer achieved through the creation of tangible value, but through the aggressive, often fraudulent, manipulation of perception and financial instruments (Ferriss).
Gatsby is the progenitor of this modern American "hustle." Unable to mine gold or build railroads, Gatsby mines the performative possibilities of his own identity. He commodifies himself. His smile, "one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it" (Fitzgerald), is his primary capital asset. It is a carefully calibrated aesthetic tool designed to project the illusion of aristocratic ease.
This commodification of the self represents the ultimate degradation of the populist ideal. The nineteenth-century populist sought economic independence to ensure political autonomy; Gatsby seeks economic excess to ensure social assimilation. His parties are not celebrations of democratic community, but extravagant theatrical productions wherein he is both the director and the unobserved audience. He provides the spectacle -- the "starlight to casual moths" -- in exchange for the proximity to old money.
Yet, this performative hustle is inherently precarious. Because Gatsby's identity is untethered from legitimate production or historical lineage, it requires constant, exhausting maintenance. He must continuously assert his "Oxford" background; he must perpetually display his imported shirts. The moment the performance falters -- the moment Tom Buchanan exposes the bootlegging operation behind the facade -- the entire edifice collapses. The tragic irony of The Great Gatsby is that in his desperate attempt to become the self-made man, Gatsby transforms himself into a commodity that the tribal elite consumes, exploits, and ultimately discards into the foul dust of the American landscape.
VII. Political Assassination by Proxy: The Execution of the Parvenu
The climax of The Great Gatsby, George Wilson's murder of Jay Gatsby, is rarely analyzed as a structural political event, yet it represents the ultimate triumph of the oligarchic elite over the populist threat. Tom Buchanan does not pull the trigger himself; doing so would violate the insulated, careless detachment that defines his class power. Instead, Tom weaponizes the disenfranchised working class against the upwardly mobile interloper. By directing a deranged, grieving George Wilson to Gatsby's estate, Tom executes a brilliant, devastating political assassination by proxy.
This maneuver perfectly encapsulates the nativist gatekeeping of the "tribal twenties" identified by Jeffrey Louis Decker (Decker 54). Tom recognizes that Gatsby's performative wealth deeply destabilizes the established social hierarchy. Gatsby has counterfeited the markers of the elite so successfully that he has nearly absconded with Daisy, the ultimate prize of the old-money establishment. To restore the exclusionary borders of his class, Tom must eliminate the parvenu. He accomplishes this by exploiting the desperate, misdirected rage of the true producer. George Wilson, thoroughly broken by the monopolistic system Tom represents, is easily manipulated into believing that the architect of his destruction is not the inherited oligarchy, but the nouveau riche bootlegger.
The geography of the murder underscores this profound political tragedy. Wilson, the ash-covered mechanic, invades the pristine, artificial sanctuary of Gatsby's West Egg estate. When Wilson pulls the trigger, he effectively executes the last, mutated remnant of the American populist dream. Capital deploys Labor to destroy the Parvenu. Tom and Daisy Buchanan then retreat entirely into their "vast carelessness," shielded by the impenetrable armor of their inherited capital (Fitzgerald). They suffer no legal or social consequences, proving that in the modern American economy, justice is a commodity exclusively reserved for the monopolistic elite.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." -- Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby
Gatsby's death, therefore, is not merely the tragic end of a romantic obsession; it is the violent, systemic foreclosure of the self-made man's right to exist within the highest echelons of American power. The murder stands as the definitive answer to the populist question posed by the entire narrative: can the self-made man, armed only with ambition and performance, truly penetrate the citadel of inherited wealth? Fitzgerald's answer is brutally unambiguous.
Conclusion: The Terminal Exhaustion of the Autogenetic Myth
Ultimately, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby serves as the definitive autopsy of the American populist imagination. By contextualizing Jay Gatsby's autogenetic performance within the historical shift from an agrarian, producerist economy to a monopolized, speculative industrial state, the profound political despair of the novel becomes crystalline. Gatsby is not a hero who failed because he dreamt too large; he is a tragic figure who failed because the historical epoch demanded a performance he could not sustain against the entrenched, nativist architecture of the established elite.
The scholarly lineages traced throughout this analysis reveal the inescapable trap of the twentieth-century American Dream. Thomas Goebel's articulation of the populist antimonopoly ethos highlights the very legitimate economic pathways that were systemically closed off by the time James Gatz looked out over Lake Superior. Consequently, the Horatio Alger myth of virtuous, incremental success, as deconstructed by Kenneth S. Lynn, was rendered obsolete: a cruel fiction peddled to the George Wilsons of the world to keep them docile in the Valley of Ashes. To ascend, Gatsby had to adopt the methodologies of the "hustle" (Ferriss), commodifying his own identity and embracing the illicit shadow economy to simulate the financial velocity of the ruling class.
Yet, as Jeffrey Louis Decker's analysis of the "tribal twenties" demonstrates, this performance was fundamentally intolerable to the nativist gatekeepers of old money. Tom Buchanan's visceral rejection of Gatsby exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of the capitalist promise: upward mobility is celebrated only as an abstract ideology, but it is violently repulsed when it physically manifests at the gates of the elite. The "foul dust" that John Fraser identifies is, therefore, the inescapable historical reality of a rigged system -- the inevitable fallout of a society that preaches egalitarian opportunity while rigorously enforcing oligarchic exclusion (Fraser 564).
Laura Goldblatt accurately identifies the American Dream as a "complex utopian structure" defined by its "immanent corruptibility" (Goldblatt 124). Gatsby's tragedy is that he believed in the pristine nature of this utopia. He believed that the past could be repeated, that a self-made man could forge a legitimate identity through the sheer force of his own will, and that the green light at the end of Daisy's dock was a universal beacon rather than an exclusive, private marker.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." -- Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby
In the end, the political performance of the self-made man collapses under the immense, crushing weight of American capital. We beat on, boats against the current, not because the dream is attainable, but because the foundational myths of the nation afford us no other vocabulary with which to articulate our inevitable defeat. Fitzgerald's genius is to have encoded this historical determinism not in political treatise but in the iridescent performance of a single, doomed man reaching for a green light across the water.
Works Cited
- Decker, Jeffrey Louis. "Gatsby's Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties." Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 28, no. 1, 1994, pp. 52-71. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1345913.
- Ferriss, Suzanne. "Refashioning the Modern American Dream: The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street, and American Hustle." The Journal of American Culture, vol. 38, no. 2, 2015, pp. 153-169. https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12869.
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, 1925.
- Fraser, John. "Dust and Dreams and The Great Gatsby." ELH, vol. 32, no. 4, 1965, pp. 554-564. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2872258.
- Goebel, Thomas. "The Political Economy of American Populism from Jackson to the New Deal." Studies in American Political Development, vol. 11, no. 1, 1997, pp. 109-148. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X00001619.
- Goldblatt, Laura. "'Can't Repeat the Past?' Gatsby and the American Dream at Mid-Century." Journal of American Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 105-124. Cambridge Core, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875815000663.
- Lynn, Kenneth S. The Dream of Success: A Study of the Modern American Imagination. Greenwood Press, 1955.
No comments:
Post a Comment