By Patty Smith, see part one here What constitutes American character is hope. Optimism. The faith that we can change, begin again (isn’t that the American Dream?). And isn’t that what the Declaration of Independence suggests? We see this motif over and over again in our literature and in that most American Dream-y of all books, The Great Gatsby. Spoiler alert if you haven’t yet read it — the last page of this gem of a novel (no partiality here) reinforces, to use President Obama’s words, “the audacity of hope,” the very quality that Nick Carraway admires so much in his neighbor and friend Gatsby, the very quality that Fitzgerald, by the audacity of his last page, inexorably links with what is central about being American. On the very last page, Fitzgerald writes as Nick, looking out over Gatsby’s land -- Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. Then, Nick reminds us of his admiration of Gatsby’s hope, his “wonder when [Gatsby] first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.” In spite of everything—Gatsby’s refusal to give up the past, the shadowy ways he has earned his fortune, the messes that ensue because of his single-minded goal—Nick has admired Gatsby’s endless gift for hope. Here at the end, though, he is trying to make sense of everything that has gone on that fateful summer. He says: “[Gatsby] had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” The dream, Nick/Fitzgerald suggests, is over. It ended almost as soon as it began, after one “transitory enchanted moment.” And here, we might think so that’s it? The American Dream is dead? That’s what Fitzgerald is suggesting after all, the impossibility of the American Dream? We might think so, but then he offers us those two final paragraphs: Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning —-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. My students and I discuss these paragraphs and lines over and over. Is Fitzgerald being pessimistic? Optimistic? And what do we make of this switch to “us” and “we?” Is Fitzgerald including all of us, all Americans, in his sweeping statements? What do we make of his punctuation here? And after much discussion, we realize how Fitzgerald, in that last page, makes Gatsby’s story a metaphor for the rest of us. We start out thinking The Great Gatsby is a traditional American Dream story of a nobody who becomes a somebody, but we discover that instead, it’s the story of America, the continent founded on “the last and greatest of all human dreams.” While Fitzgerald does seem to be pointing out that the dream is long gone, we will continue, he says, to “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
This is what Americans do. This is what America is. I happen to be taking an online course on Whitman and the Civil War right now, too, and I can’t help but think of “Song of Myself,” and Whitman’s exploration of our “democratic experiment” that seemed on the verge of collapse because of the looming Civil War. He felt the immense need to write down his vision of democracy, to create a version of an “American Self” that he calls “I” in the poem. The “democratic experiment” began with the Declaration of Independence. That long second paragraph sets forth in words the story of our country; it acts as a kind of prophecy. Maybe we can even say it’s a kind of green light to which we aspire. Let’s go back to Langston Hughes again. In “Let America Be America Again,” we hear echoes of Whitman, his “I”/American self. After Hughes enumerates all the people who have been ignored, who haven’t yet felt the freedom that is promised, he writes: Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in very furrow turned That’s made America the land it has become. […] O, let America be America again-- The land that never has been yet -- And yet must be—the land where every man is free -- The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME-- Who made America, […] O, yes I say it plain, America never was American to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be! In spite of everything, the speaker in this poet is optimistic. He has kept his faith that “America will be,” just as Fitzgerald says we’ll “run faster” and “stretch out our arms farther.” I guess I’m thinking that our stories make us into who are. The Declaration of Independence is the blueprint for this democratic experiment.
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