Does It Still Hold Up: Debating the Classics Every Week

Is The Great Gatsby the timeless American novel, or is it just a beautifully written story about rich, sad people we can't relate to anymore? Okay, right to it. I feel like this is the final boss of our whole "Does It Still Hold Up?" series we kicked off in our last episode. It really is. It's the one everyone has an opinion on, usually because they were forced to read it in tenth grade and, uh, never quite recovered. And that’s the thing! People resent it for being assigned reading, but they miss how sharp it still is. I mean, the critique of the American Dream? The idea that you can just invent a new self with enough money and the right clothes?

That is the story of social media. Oh, come on. No, really! Jay Gatsby is the original influencer. He curated this entire persona, this brand, based on nothing but aspiration. The original influencer... I like that. But is he, though? Influencers today are selling a lifestyle that, theoretically, you can buy into. Gatsby’s selling a fantasy to win over ONE person. It’s incredibly specific and, honestly, a little pathetic. But the performance is the same! The curated parties, the perfect shirts, the mysterious backstory... it's all a front. And Nick watches him, both admiring the spectacle and seeing the absolute hollowness underneath.

That tension is MORE relevant now, not less. We're all Nick Carraway scrolling through our feeds. Okay, I see the parallel with performance. I do. But my core issue is with the characters themselves. They're all so... thin. They're symbols, not people. Daisy is just this idea of a woman, Tom is brute force, and Gatsby himself is more of a concept than a character. I just don't CARE about any of them. You don't have to like them to find them compelling! That's the point. Fitzgerald isn't asking for your sympathy. He's putting a very specific, very toxic slice of the upper class under a microscope. But it's SUCH a specific slice! It's a critique of a dream that was only ever available to a tiny, wealthy, white sliver of the population.

Does that really speak to the "American Dream" in the twenty-first century? For most people, the dream isn't about, you know, a mansion on the Long Island Sound, it's about affording healthcare. Alright, I'll give you that one. The scope of their problems is absolutely drenched in privilege. Right? It's hard to feel the tragedy of a man who owns a hydroplane. But the emotions are universal. The longing for a past that never really existed? The disillusionment when you finally get the thing you wanted and it feels empty? That's not about class, that's human. Is it, though? Or is it just a specific kind of ennui that comes from having too much money and no real problems?

Nick Carraway is our way in, and he's so passive. He just stands by and judges everyone without ever really DOING anything. Why should we trust this guy's perspective? Because he’s us! He’s the person who is both drawn to the glamour and repulsed by the moral decay. He’s implicated. He’s not a hero, he’s a witness. That’s what makes the narration so brilliant and so modern. He's complicit. Huh. Complicit. I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I always just saw him as... well, weak. But maybe you're right, maybe that's the point of him. I think so. And maybe that's the real tension here. It's not about whether Gatsby is a "good book" in a vacuum.

It's about what we expect from a "Great American Novel" today. Yeah, you're right. We want it to be two things at once, don't we? We want it to be a perfect, beautiful time capsule of the 1920s... ...and we also want it to be a perfect moral and social mirror for today. With characters who are relatable and have the right opinions about everything. And it just can't be both. So the question isn't really "does it hold up?" It's more like... "what parts of it do we choose to hold up?" The gorgeous prose and the critique of empty wealth? Or do we focus on the dated gender roles and the narrowness of its world? Exactly. And the fact that we're still arguing about it, almost a hundred years later, probably means it's doing something right.