Why The Great Gatsby is great, to me

The Great Gatsby may be the greatest American novel for its depiction of the American dream, and it's beloved by many for all sorts of other reasons, and famously by those who can overlook how most of the characters are "unlikeable". I read the novel like everyone else in high school (specifically, freshman year) and like all the novels I read that year, I connected with it. But I'm not sure it's in the same way most other people do. See, I like The Great Gatsby because Gatsby is a hopeless failure.

In my class, there was as discussion of whether Gatsby was a good person at all--in the sense that he wanted Daisy to go outside of her marriage--and I didn't have the heart to argue with them. Because I sort of related to Gatsby, and I knew sadly what Nick meant when he said, "You can't repeat the past."

Oh, I didn't have a crazy and immoral plan, really. I just wanted to have a platonic friend (and oh I was aware how ambiguous and fragile that sounded) to trust based on incorrect assumptions of how compatible we seemed (more to others than to ourselves, really), and I was also going through a very stressful part of my life. This isn't the place to talk about it, really. But the past--and childhood innocence--was very key to me, something I wanted to return to, and he was the ultimate symbol of that. I didn't know him as a person, really, just various symbols for stages of my life.

I wanted to return to that past, but at the time of reading it I did begin to feel that it just wasn't possible, that I was only clinging to it in vain hope. And The Great Gatsby knows this too. His vision collapses, and it's delightfully cynical to me. I'm not the one to believe that there is a big plan to the universe, and I do believe we have some agency, but there is a point at which things are way too far past fixing, when it's hopeless. It's not often a message you see either, with the improbably successful "get the girl" (or boy) trope in stories.

Maybe Gatsby is selfish, and Daisy and Tom are definitely, as Nick remarks, careless people. But there's a reason Nick says at the beginning that Gatsby is the only person he finds worth redemption. He had not known Daisy for years; he was only acquainted with the symbol of her in his mind, and he fails to realize it. He was disillusioned. He was wrong, of course, and we all are at some point in our lives. But unlike the rest of us, Gatsby never got the chance to learn from it.

But we can learn from it. We have the book to read.