“Yet it is not, as more recent critics often contend, that Gatsby lays bare an
American Dream sullied by inequality and injustice, a perverted mirror of
its idealistic incarnation. Rather, following Bloch’s parameters, reading the re-presentation of the American Dream in Gatsby as hollow to its core, a core that the novel traces to the origins of Europeans on American soil, actually bolsters the dream’s utopian potential…The dream, in other words, is transposable and its openness to reinterpretation serves as one vector for understanding its ability to seduce.”
Upon first reading this paragraph, the content of the argument was totally lost on me. I didn’t fully understand the point Goldblatt was making, until I had an understanding of the context surrounding the claim. Goldblatt’s paper largely focuses on the post-war popularity of The Great Gatsby, and she dissects the factors that influence the rise in popularity. She claims that “Gatsby was one of the volumes” that was “intended to counter Fascism and Communism abroad and at home”. Looking at the novel through this view creates a new avenue to go about understanding how the American Dream influences the novel.
Goldblatt asserts that recent critics view the American Dream in the novel as a perverted image of the “real” American Dream, seemingly criticizing the idea as a whole. In Goldblatt’s view however, by characterizing the American Dream as hollow in the novel, the utopian aspects of the dream are actually heightened. She argues that through this lens, we can begin to understand the appeal of the novel to a wide audience: it’s “transposable and it’s openness to reinterpretation”.
This idea that the American Dream is widely reinterpretable is particularly appealing to a mass audience. If individuals can find ways to relate to the utopian idea of an American Dream, they can come together to metaphorically defend the Dream itself, regardless of what it means to other people. This accounts for the nationalistic popularity of the novel that Goldblatt points out.
While The Great Gatsby might not give two readers the same takeaways from the novel, the takeaways they do get will likely instill a sense of national pride for the American Dream, despite the two readers’ dreams being entirely different. In this way, The Great Gatsby was able to effectively gain popularity and drum up nationalism due to it’s focus on the American Dream being utopian in nature and easily reinterpreted.