And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He 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.
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an intriguing article on the appeal that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, has for first- and second-generation immigrant students, as they pursue their own equivalents of Gatsby’s green light.
A number of high school students from third-world backgrounds were interviewed for the article, and their uncanny ability to relate to Fitzgerald’s patrician style and lily-white Jazz Age hero should give multiculturalists something to think about.
Some of the youngsters identified with Gatsby’s success. He comes from nowhere, re-invents himself and makes a fortune. James Gatz from the wilds of North Dakota becomes Jay Gatsby, the millionaire with the mansion on Long Island.
Others identified with Gatsby’s early struggle for self-improvement. After Gatsby is murdered at the end of the novel, his grieving father shows up with a tattered copy of a Hopalong Cassidy western that his son had when he was a boy. Written on the last fly-leaf are a series of high-minded resolutions about rising early, working out with dumbbells, reading widely, studying electricity and elocution and –- touchingly –- being better to his parents.
Still other students recognized that Fitzgerald was writing a cautionary tale about the dark side of the American dream: the endless pursuit of “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” One high school student from Jamaica said flatly, “The American dream is not open to everyone.”
Another student, a 14-year-old girl from China named Jinzhao Wang, took a more optimistic view of the green light. “Green color always represents hope,” she said. Ms. Wang’s own green light is to be admitted to Harvard. But that is not her ultimate goal. In her view, “There is a green light beyond the green light.” For her, that means returning to China after she graduates from Harvard, to help her country develop even faster.
Young Ms. Wang seems to be wise beyond her years. The Declaration of Independence names the “pursuit” of happiness is one of the inalienable rights of humankind. It does not guarantee that we will run fast enough to catch up to it. Happiness is elusive. We are more likely to attain it if our “green light” is an objective bigger than our own personal satisfaction.
