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  • Hi there I’m John Green

  • this is Crash Course English 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.

  • [plus a case study for the awkwardness of editing classics for a modern audience]

  • Were also a nation that believes in the American dream:

  • [lottery jackpots & lawsuit windfalls?]

  • 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 Cathering loser Daisy Buchannan burns with the fire of a thousand suns.

  • Ugh, Me from the Past.

  • Here’s the thing: Youre 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?

  • [Stanimal, off-camera:] It’s not your birthday or Merebration.

  • Ahh, stupid Merebration only coming once a year!

  • [let's go for it quarterly. cupcakes...]

  • I don’t know how 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 Buchannan 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 some of the exact same 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.

  • [BEST]

  • [intro music]

  • [intro music]

  • [intro music]

  • [intro music]

  • [intro music]

  • [EVAR]

  • So today were 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?

  • 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

  • high-falutin 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.

  • 3. Finally, three, 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 is 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 a quote

  • extraordinary gift for hope.”

  • This extraordinary gift for hope is the essential fact of Gatsby

  • and also many romantic leads

  • from Romeo, to [sparkly glowy] Edward Cullen

  • to Henry the VIII, who might have given up on several of his wives,

  • but never gave up on the idea of love! [oh how love can make you lose your head]

  • all of these people share a creepy belief that if they just get the thing they want

  • the thing being a female human being— [so literal, the objectification]

  • then theyll finally be happy.

  • We have a word for this; it’s called objectification.

  • [like i said]

  • 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 Buchannan is crazy richlike polo pony rich

  • thanks to her marriage to Tom Buchanan,

  • Tom is a former football player, and lifelong asshat, [tech classification]

  • 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 youre under 21,

  • it may 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, that says,

  • Were Nordics and weve 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 theyre sitting on,

  • they didn’t grow or cook the food theyre 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 daughter and famously says,

  • “I hope shell be a fool

  • that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

  • [so Daisy invented Toddlers & Tiaras?]

  • 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. [lovely segue there, Johnny]

  • 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, youre always a little bit underwhelming.

  • 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, [or did he?]

  • but his book sure reads like prophecy.

  • The truth, heroic past, is that we may think 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.

  • [at least it was in the service of a valiant cause. i don't mean that]

  • Alright, let’s go to 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 sayingold sportall the time

  • and trying to sound upper-crusty, [crusty is right]

  • he’s totally charming:

  • He has a smile that makes you feel he is irresistibly prejudiced in your favor,

  • to quote Nick. [must start signing letters w that line]

  • 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 in 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. [spoilers]

  • All the money he has 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 the 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, his tie, the buttons on Daisy’s dress.