A Hundred Years of Gatsby

Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead!

It is not just a single thing that makes a novel “timeless.” The majority of novels which have the honour of having been described as such usually resemble each other in one way or another—their themes are often seen as universal, the writing style is provocative, and the main characters are usually relatable and multi-dimensional. However, a few books have been as popular for as long as The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. 

This book was initially published on April 10, 1925, when Fitzgerald was just 28 years old. He was already an established author, having published two popular novels just a few years earlier. Despite the popularity of his two previous books, The Great Gatsby was a much smaller success, with only 20,000 copies being sold in the first edition. 

The novel chronicles the life of Jay Gatsby, written by his neighbour, Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate, with inclinations to romanticize his own life as well as the lives of others. Nick Carraway moves to New York in 1922 to learn about the bond business and rents a house in West Egg, which is right next to the grand villa of the mysterious and wealthy Gatsby, whose real name is James Gatz. Unlike his flashy neighbours, Nick has connections to East Egg, where his cousin Daisy lives with her unfaithful husband, Tom, who is a philanthropist with notable violent tendencies and is the embodiment of “old money gone bad.” Nick discovers Gatsby’s deep love for Daisy, whom he had known before the First World War. Gatsby throws lavish parties in hopes of rekindling their romance. Nick helps reunite them and they begin an affair. Tensions rise and Tom exposes Gatsby’s criminal past. Daisy ultimately chooses Tom. After Daisy accidentally kills Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, Gatsby takes the blame. Myrtle’s husband kills Gatsby, then himself. The novel ends when Nick, disillusioned, returns to the Midwest, where he ponders Gatsby’s dream and the moral decay beneath the glittering surface of the American upper class, and quintessentially, the “American Dream.”

Although more than a hundred years have passed since its publication, the recycling of this tale, the tale of “The American Dream” but also the tale of a life without love—the tale of a life full of yearning—continues to this day, even after the pages of Fitzgerald’s novel have been turned to their very end. Playwrights, filmmakers, cartoonists, rappers and numerous novelists have taken their shots at turning Fitzgerald’s text into something new, all while paying tribute to its unparalleled influence. At least four feature films, countless television episodes, an opera, two musicals, and—especially since it entered the public domain four years ago—a whirlwind of fan-fiction sequels, prequels and retellings have emerged.

One of the key reasons for the eternal success of The Great Gatsby has been its raw approach to money, love, power and reputation. How we imagine him has much to do with how we see ourselves. Gatsby and his interpretation have gone through numerous transformations. Various generations have interpreted the text according to their perception of Gatsby—his glamour, his melancholy, or his parties being analyzed and celebrated for what they are, as well as for what they are not. 

Despite its initial lack of success, after Fitzgerald died in 1940 and especially after the end of the Second World War, The Great Gatsby became the most published book in North America, a sign of its major success. We can't be sure why this happened, although many would agree that it was probably due to post-World War II sentiment: nostalgia for the 20th century, because it symbolized a time of optimism. This period saw Gatsby as the  “Jazz Age Man,” based on the novel that became a symbol of this optimism. His story was repeated on TV and in the movies and the character became an archetype. Meanwhile, knee-length pants and cowboy hats, art-deco and dissipation paraded across screens, in “Singin' in the Rain” and “Some Like It Hot,” as well as movies like  Funny Girl and Chicago, and in the fashion pages. This was the era of The Great Gatsby.

In the 1950s, Gatsby started to be seen from a more existentialist perspective, commencing the phase of Gatsby as “The First Existentialist.” After the Second World War, thanks to the growing readership of The Great Gatsby, the readership of the novel widened. Paperback editions proliferated, and the novel was cited by young authors including J.D. Salinger. Hollywood, which first brought the book to the screen in 1926, made further adaptations. It came to be seen less as a satire of the '20s than as a commentary on the predicament of modern man, a precursor to popular contemporary novels such as Albert Camus's The Stranger, Saul Bellow's The Dangling Man and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. In the 1950s, people started to recognize that the book was not only about glamour, money and parties; Gatsby's life was marked by alienation and nostalgia. His death, an act of senseless violence, is a textbook case of the absurd.

The character of “Snoopy” is another example of the shift in the perception of this novel. Snoopy, who represents Gatsby's quintessential existentialism, is world-weary, constantly tired and quiet. This bow-tie-clad alter ego of Gatsby appeared for the first time in 1998, as part of a series of Gatsby-themed Peanuts strips, embodying Gatsby’s existentialism, which had risen to acclamation at this time. 

“Hip-Hop Gatsby” is yet another example of the timelessness of The Great Gatsby. How can the epitome of glamour become the embodiment of existentialism and then Hip Hop? This version of Gatsby owes its popularity to the 2013 film “The Great Gatsby” by Baz Luhrmann, as well as the memes created by Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby. Besides memes, music is another quintessential part of the formation of “Hip-Hop Gatsby.”The soundtrack is a collage of contemporary pop and rap, from Lana Del Rey, Florence and the Machine, and Beyoncé, among many others, and was produced by Jay-Z. Like jazz in the 1920s, hip-hop is a black American musical idiom that has become the soundtrack of the age, a complex, fast-evolving art form loaded with aesthetic possibilities, perfectly reflective of The Great Gatsby in its own, innovative, modern way.

The Great Gatsby owes much of its success to luck, as many literary pieces do, in the world of publishing and advertising. However, it is inevitably Francis Scott Fitzgerald's genius, which lies in his ability to describe a dynamic world and characters that are unique and specific, but also ordinary enough to be realistic. Generating feelings of grandiosity but also sadness and melancholy, this work is timeless and relevant across centuries, from the Jazz Age to the era of Hip Hop. The Great Gatsby is open for everyone to interpret as they wish. As Fitzgerald, through the personification of Gatsby, says at the end of the book: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Photo source: Urban Romantics on Flickr