‘The Great Gatsby’

The Great Gatsby was the first novel that made me feel American.

I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel for the first time when I was 13 years old, as a precursor to a family plan to see the 2013 Leonardo DiCaprio movie version in the theater. I remember finishing the book about half an hour before we were set to go see the film.

In the end, I never saw the film. I was so reluctant to break the spell of Fitzgerald’s words. It was the first time a book had made the “American Dream” a concrete concept for me. The phrase no longer felt vague and trite — a half-understood concept parroted by history teachers rambling about long-dead white people and their excuses for pursuing Manifest Destiny. Instead, the term glowed with patriotism and real promise — it felt like, with the final lines of the novel, Fitzgerald had plucked a piece of Gatsby’s green light, and it was now shining away somewhere inside me.

Nevertheless, many of my initial visions of grandeur were stripped away upon my second reading during my junior year of high school. Gatsby is a cipher of a man, a millionaire who tries to buy love, happiness and his piece of that American Dream and who, of course, pays a terrible price for his hubris and desires. So many of Gatsby’s more problematic qualities became clear — partially as a result of the recent presidential election. It was hard to want to feel patriotic when I was so out of love with my nation. I felt the novel held the same wealthy, white, male-centric view of the universe that seemed, historically, to have dominated and caused many of America’s worst episodes. I was bored with that perspective.

It took a third reading for me to find a happy medium, and while I don’t see The Great Gatsby as necessarily the greatest American novel, I also don’t think that it is overrated or should be neglected. With the beauty of the writing and syntax and a better understanding of how his writing style awakened the American Dream within me, I still consider Fitzgerald the champion of bringing these themes to life within the mind of the reader.

The last passage of the novel is still the most powerful I’ve ever read. I feel a profound connection to the idea of that American Dream every time I read it — regardless of my current feelings of patriotism.

Acacia Burnham is a 2018 graduate of the New Mexico School for the Arts. Contact her at burnham.acacia@ nmschoolforthearts.org.