Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature. So the two books most often cited as the "Great
American novel" are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and this slender beast, The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The US is a country founded on the principles of freedom and equality;
Huck Finn is a novel about slavery and radical inequality. We're also a nation that believes
in the American Dream. We pride ourselves on our lack of aristocracy and the equality
of opportunity, but Gatsby is a novel about our de facto aristocracy and the limits of
American Opportunity. I mean, Daisy Buchanan- Mr Green, I hate everything about this stupid
collection of first world problems passing for a novel, but my hatred of that Willa Cather-ing loser
Daisy Buchanan burns with the fire of a thousand suns! Ugh, me from the past, here's the thing: you're
not supposed to like Daisy Buchanan, at least not in the uncomplicated way that you like, say, cupcakes. By the way, Stan, where are my cupcakes? Stan: It's not your birthday or Merebration. Ah, stupid Merebration, coming only once a
year. I don't know where you got the idea that the
quality of a novel should be judged by the likeability of its characters, but let me
submit to you that Daisy Buchanan doesn't have to be likeable to be interesting. Furthermore,
most of what makes her unlikeable -- her sense of entitlement, her limited empathy, her inability
to make difficult choices - are the very things that make you unlikeable! That's the pleasure
and challenge of reading great novels, you get to see yourself as others see you,
and you get to see others as they see themselves. [Theme Music] So today we're going to focus on the American
Dream and how it plays out in the Great Gatsby. Spoiler alert, some petals fall off the Daisy.
So let's begin with the characters. From the first chapter, we know three things
about our narrator, Nick Carraway - By the way, get it? Care away? It's not that sophisticated,
he could have done better. 1) Nick grew up in the Midwest then moved
to New York's West Egg, and then something happened that made him move back to the Midwest. Also, 2) He is prone to the use of highfalutin
language as when he introduces Jay Gatsby by saying, "Gatsby turned out alright in the
end; it was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that
temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations
of men." That dream, by the way, with all of its foul dust, is the American Dream. Finally, 3) Nick is rich, and he got rich
not by working but by having a rich ancestor who paid someone off to serve in the Civil
War on his behalf which allowed Nick's ancestor to spend the Civil War making money. So how's
that for equal opportunity? And then there's Gatsby, about whom we learn
absolutely nothing in chapter 1, except for the aforementioned foul dust floating in the wake of his
dreams and that he had an "extraordinary gift for hope." This extraordinary gift for hope is the essential
fact of Gatsby and also many romantic leads from Romeo to Edward Cullen to Henry VIII,
who might have given up on several of his wives but never gave up on the idea of love! All of these people share a creepy belief
that if they just get the thing they want -- the thing being a female human being --
then they'll finally be happy. We have a word for this;
it's called objectification. Then you have the aggressively vapid Daisy
Buchanan, Nick's distant cousin who lives across the bay from Gatsby and Nick in the
much more fashionable East Egg. Daisy Buchanan is crazy rich -- like polo pony rich -- thanks
to her marriage to Tom Buchanan. Tom is a former football player and a life
long asshat who Nick describes as "one of those men who achieves such an acute, limited
excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax." Listen, if you're
under 21 it might be difficult to apprehend the depth of that burn, but trust me, it's
a burn. So soon after the novel begins, Daisy and
Tom ask Nick to come over for dinner, where the golfer Jordan Baker is also there, and they have
this awful party. And there's this great moment when Tom goes on a racist rant and says, "We're Nordics and
we've produced all the things that make a civilization," Which is hilarious because none of those
people has actually produced anything. They didn't make the fancy furniture they're
sitting on, they didn't grow or cook the food they're eating, they don't even light their
own freaking candles! Anyway we also learn that Tom has a mistress and that Daisy might
not be as stupid as she's letting on, because she looks at her young daughter and famously
says, "I hope she'll be a fool, that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a
beautiful little fool." Now look, it's difficult to argue that Daisy
is a good person -- after all, in the novel's climax she allows Gatsby to take the fall for something
she did -- but she's a product of a much older American system, one that, for instance, allows rich people
to pay poor people to go fight the Civil War for them. Oh it's time for the open letter? I never
noticed this chair was gold before, Stan. It makes me think of wealth. And to a lesser
extent, decay. An open letter to the Heroic Past. But first, let's see
what's on top of the secret compartment today. Oh, it's a champagne glass, I love champagne.
Stan! There are champagne poppers in here! You put explosive miniature champagne bottles
in my champagne glass instead of champagne!! Dear Heroic Past,
Like champagne poppers, you're always a little bit underwhelming. (POP!). The thing is, Heroic
Past, which of our pasts was so heroic? Was it the part where we owned other human beings?
Was it the part where we fought over the right to own other human beings?
Was it Gatsby's Jazz Age, with its fast cars, deliciously illegal alcohol and rapidly expanding
stock portfolios? I mean, the amazing thing about the Great Gatsby is that Fitzgerald
didn't know the Great Depression was coming, but his book sure reads like prophecy. The truth, Heroic Past, is that we may thing
we want to recreate you, but what we actually want to do is we want to recreate you without
all the problems we don't remember. And that's how you ruin your life over a girl
you dated for a month five years ago. Best wishes,
John Green From that dinner party, it's clear that wealth
consumes the rich, but there's also a moment where it becomes clear that wealth consumes
the poor. Daisy tells a story about her butler, that he used to polish silver for a big family
in the city night and day until the caustic silver polish ruined his nose. Alright, let's
go the the Thought Bubble. So whenever Nick is hanging out with the mega-rich
Tom, the parties are always awful and everybody always wants the kind of status and wealth
that Tom Buchanan has, which is hilarious because of course Tom is a horrible asshat who makes
Paris Hilton look, like, charming and grounded. But then we get to go to some awesome parties, at
Gatsby's house on West Egg. And even though Gatsby has the annoying habit of saying "old sport" all the time and trying to sound upper-crusty, he's totally charming. He has a "smile that makes you feel he is
irresistibly prejudiced in your favor," to quote Nick. The first party at Gatsby's house also contains,
despite being set during Prohibition, the greatest drunk-driving scene in the history
of American literature in which a guy gets in an accident, like, three seconds after
getting into his car, and even though the wheel has fallen off the car, he keeps trying
to drive it. To Fitzgerald, that had become the American Dream by the 1920s: everyone
wanted enough money to buy fancy cars and enough whiskey to crash them. But Gatsby, tellingly, doesn't drink. He's
never even used his pool, well until the very end of the novel. All the money he's acquired
and all the parties he throws, are about one thing and one thing only: winning back Daisy
Buchanan. There's a flashback in the novel to Gatsby's first meeting with Daisy and when
you hear Gatsby tell that story it's very telling that it's hard to understand whether
Gatsby is falling for Daisy or for her mansion. But when they finally reunite years later
and Gatsby has a mansion of his own everything is yellow: Gatsby's car is yellow, his tie,
the buttons on Daisy's dress; at one point Nick, who's third-wheeling it big time in
this scene, describes some flowers as "smelling like pale gold." What does that even mean?! Thanks, Thought Bubble. So the most famous
color symbol in The Great Gatsby is the Green Light at the end of Daisy's dock that Gatsby
is always looking out at from across the bay. Gatsby just wants to reach across the bay
and get to that Green Light and if he can he believes he will have the girl and the
life that has driven his wild ambition. Nick calls that Green Light at one point "an
enchanted object", and that's what symbols really are in both literature and real life.
So yes, the Green Light is a symbol in Gatsby but this isn't only stuff that happens in
novels. We all have enchanted objects in our lives. On the night that I got engaged I drank
champagne with the woman who is now my wife and I still have the cork from that champagne
bottle - I'm lying. I couldn't afford corky champagne it was twist off champagne, but
I still have the bottle cap. So just as the Green Light is an enchanted
object, gold and yellow are enchanted colors in Gatsby and also, for the record, in real
life. I mean think of golden opportunities, or golden ages, or your golden youth, or the
golden arches. Unless you're at McDonald's, gold is the color that conflates wealth and
beauty. But while in our culture the yellow color
of gold is seen as telling us that wealth is beauty and beauty, wealth - in the novel
The Great Gatsby it's a bit different. In the novel yellow is the color not only of
wealth but also of death: Myrtle Wilson's house is yellow, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg
-- which stare over so much death in the novel in so many ways -- are ringed in yellow glasses,
Gatsby's car -- that fatal missile -- is yellow. Now that may seem like symbol hunting to you,
but I'd argue that it's really important to understand that Fitzgerald is using gold to
decouple the ideas of wealth and greatness, and instead he's associating richness with
corruption and amorality and finally death. In the roaring 20's and today wealth was seen
as profoundly good; it was seen as an end that justified most means. Wealth was the
American Dream. But the foul dust that trailed in the wake of those dreams - the casual destruction,
the cyclical violence, the erosion of altruism -- make it clear that at least to Fitzgerald,
wealth isn't simply good. The last chapter of The Great Gatsby is one
of the saddest passages in American Literature, showing how difficult it is to distinguish
between guilt and innocence, and how intractably unfair our society is -- even if we don't have
barons and duchesses. I mean, some people argue that Gatsby couldn't
live the American Dream because he didn't come by his money honestly, but who in the
novel did come by their money honestly? And you can argue that Gatsby fails because
nothing is ever enough -- it's not enough for Daisy to love him, she must also say that she never
loved Tom. But this is America, man, when was enough
ever enough for us? We invented super-sizing! I mean -- we invented the stretch limousine,
we invented the Hummer, and then we invented the Hummer stretch limousine! We all believe,
as Nick says at the end of the novel, "that if we can only run faster, stretch out our
arms farther, then one fine morning..." We've come to believe in this American Dream
not just in the United States but throughout the world. We understand that much will be
lost in pursuit of this dream - not just that butler's noses will be ruined - but that vast
valleys of ashes will pile up outside of our cities as we consume ever more stuff. We know
this is unsustainable, we know that these parties can't last forever, and that we won't be able to drive home in our three wheeled cars; but still we press on. Next week we'll consider whether Gatsby's
quest, and ours, is a heroic one, but for now I just want to encourage you not to dismiss
the characters in this novel simply because they may seem different from you. At one point
Nick recalls all the people who would go to those great parties and sneer most bitterly
at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor. Let me submit to you that those of us who
would sneer at Gatsby do so on the courage of his liquor, because the truth is, we all share his ambition. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week. Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan
Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko. The associate producer is Danica Johnson.
The show was written by me and our graphics team is Thought Bubble. Every week when I might otherwise curse, I
use the name of one of my favorite writers. If you'd like to suggest writers, you can
do so in comments where you can also ask questions about today's video that will be answered
by our team of literature experts. And now I will leave you to observe the abundant
metaphorical resonances of this chair, but thanks for watching Crash Course and as we
say in my home town, don't forget to be awesome.
