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Put simply, the American Dream is the ideal of opportunity for all, of
advancement in a career or society without any regard to one's origin.
The ideal was embodied in Thomas Jefferson's "Declaration
of Independence" as `Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.' Jefferson
was specifically reacting against the `closed' European societies, where power
and wealth were seen to be in the hands of the aristocratic governing elite.
Thus, the dream idealizes those who are `self-made,' as opposed to those who
gain wealth and status through inheritance. One of the commonest
critical approaches to The Great Gatsby has been to see it as a new myth of
America—a myth partaking of the flavor of the 1920s. We are well aware that the
term `Gatsby' has become a generic term used in the American context to allude to
a lot of things—the jazz age, the fabulous parties, the idea and pursuit of
the American Dream, the democratic idealism when the mythic Gatsby is said
to be `a son of God' having `risen from a Platonic conception of
himself' and waiting eternally for the `green light' to emanate from the end of Daisy's dock. Gatsby
is also implicitly linked to some of the other mythic figures of American
literature who have similar status, in particular, James Fennimore Cooper's Natty
Bumppo, and Mark Twain's Huck Finn. These characters are supposedly mythical,
in that they manifest abstract ideals attractive to Americans—personal
freedom, a self-reliant individuality, and a belief in personal integrity rather
than conformity. Also, Fitzgerald's myth seems to be about the decadence of
American values. Gatsby's dream, although it finally destroys him tragically, raises
him above the other characters, giving him a dignity that other characters
had never possessed.
Since intertextuality refers to far more than the `influences' of writers
on each other, the objective of this paper is to explore how the 1925
canonical American text, The Great Gatsby—a novel that T S Eliot announced to be
"a remarkable book…the first step that American fiction has taken since
Henry James"—is read and interpreted many decades later through different
multi-ethnic texts. It is also interesting because it shows how the iconic figure of
Jay Gatsby, the protagonist, has transcended American shores to rest in
various forms in the psyche of men and women from diverse cultures across the
world. Apart from analyzing this beautifully written rags-to-riches narrative, this
paper deals with the use of the novel, the myth behind the American Dream of
success, as well as the representation of the protagonist Gatsby in different avatars
in cross-cultural settings, showing how the text's canonical status can never
be overestimated. |
