“The Catcher in the Rye,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Lord of the Flies.” For at least the last half-century these books have been synonymous with American high school English curricula.
But the canon is shifting. At U-High, Clint Smith’s “Counting Descent” replaced “The Catcher in the Rye,” Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” replaced Robert Fagles’ and, for two years, “The Great Gatsby” left the sophomore English curriculum, returning just in time for its 100th anniversary this spring.
If some of these books have been replaced by modern counterparts or works that seem more timely, one would assume that “The Great Gatsby,” written in the 1920s, might also feel out of date. When I read it in class this past spring, the opposite proved true. One hundred years later, the novel remains pertinent.
Despite the difference in details — flapper dresses versus low-rise jeans, the first trans-Atlantic telephone calls versus the invention of artificial intelligence — I recognized my own experiences in Fitzgerald’s depiction of the 1920s. During a period of unprecedented technological advancement, his characters long for their lives before World War I, a conceit surprisingly — or unsurprisingly — relevant for teenagers who lived through the coronavirus pandemic.
The novel follows Nick Carraway, our supposedly impassive narrator who forms a complicated friendship with Jay Gatsby, from whom the novel gets its name. Gatsby is newly rich and intent on recreating his life before he was sent to fight in the war. His efforts are concentrated on Nick’s cousin, Daisy, Gatsby’s former lover who married in the interim.
What felt familiar to me in “The Great Gatsby” was Gatsby’s longing for the past. Nostalgia preys on Gatsby, shaping his existence and motivations as he reaches forward to something already behind him. Even Gatsby’s most famous line evokes nostalgia: “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’” Despite this proclamation, when Gatsby attempts to repeat the past, his life falls apart. In the aftermath, Daisy, with whom Gatsby had rekindled a doomed relationship, returns to Tom, her priggish, bigoted husband, and flees the city.
Given the fates of these characters, I was disturbed to discover parallels to my own longing for a pre-pandemic world, one free from AI and, for the most part, imminent threats to our democracy. However, what makes the characters flawed and morally reprehensible is also what makes the novel relevant.
As of this year, it is unclear whether free and fair elections will persist or if independent universities will exist long enough for us to graduate from them. I have seen two kinds of responses emerge in my friends and classmates as the future grows ever more uncertain. Some people, like Gatsby, feel as if something precious was taken from them. They lament the present, mostly by cursing high school and its endless demands. Others, who have retreated into their “vast carelessness” like Daisy and Tom, embrace the present without regard for the future, seeking distraction in fleeting social complexities. “The Great Gatsby” works out an analogous drama, characteristic of teenagers at any moment in time, but currently amplified.
Despite coming out in 1925, the “The Great Gatsby” deftly foreshadows the Great Depression. Reading it now we know nothing of what is coming in our time, except what the novel teaches us: the cost of trying to repeat the past.
