I. THE AMERICAN DREAM AND COLD WAR READERSHIP

Since the 1970s, scholars have generally emphasized the role of ideological formation and the influence of popular culture upon The Great Gatsby, a trend that has carried over to this day. In an essay from 2009, T. Austin Graham, for instance, examines Gatsby's phonic valence to argue that Fitzgerald frequently referenced popular rather than more highbrow songs, an insight that highlights the ephemeral and fleeting quality of many of the novel's most famously emotional scenes.Footnote ⁹ Those scholars most interested in analyzing The Great Gatsby's representation of the American Dream have, likewise, applied a cultural lens, tending to focus upon race and, to a lesser degree, class in the novel as a way to clarify the social scene in the US of the 1920s. In this vein, Meredith Goldsmith compares Gatsby to narratives of passing emerging from the Harlem Renaissance and concludes that, though the novel appropriates black cultural forms for its own ends, it does so to refute the notion of authenticity in regard to identity categories.Footnote ¹⁰

Others, though, have drawn upon the novel's representation of race and ethnicity to complicate its ideological investments. In dazzling readings of The Great Gatsby, critics such as Walter Benn Michaels have cast the novel as a complicated and contradictory but ultimately racist and nativist text, one that participates in the wider outcry over immigration in the 1920s, the changing rights of African Americans after the end of radical Reconstruction, and the fluctuating status of indigenous groups within the continental US.Footnote ¹¹ Similarly, Jeffrey Louis Decker exposes the xenophobic and ethnically exclusionary currents that run through the novel's pages as a way to describe the juridical and social scene of the United States in the 1920s. These and likeminded appraisals call attention to the American Dream to demonstrate its misleading nature: in titling his essay “Gatsby's Pristine Dream,” Decker highlights the genocidal implications of racial purity in the novel by playing off the dual meanings of the word “pristine” as untarnished but also racially pure. This method of analysis hearkens back to an earlier critical moment: throughout the 1970s, critics returned to Leslie Fiedler's 1964 work Waiting for the End to investigate Gatsby's anti-Semitic portrayal of the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, often impugning Fitzgerald in the process.Footnote ¹² Similarly, in 1980, Richard Lehan reignited the debate over The Great Gatsby's take on the possibilities of upward mobility by tracing Gatsby's resemblance to the writings of Oswald Spengler, a German philosopher credited with publishing the most famous philosophical-historical treatise on the eventual obsolescence of high, and by extension European, culture in his work The Decline of the West (1918).Footnote ¹³

This tendency persists even when race is used as a way to analyze Gatsby's relation to nationalism. When Peter Mallios compares The Great Gatsby to James Conrad's Nostromo, he argues that Nick's narcissistic projections into Gatsby's past and psyche cast this eponymous character as a fictitious and empty signifier that ultimately codifies a variety of national narratives into a coherent whole.Footnote ¹⁴ Richard Godden applies a more classical Marxist heuristic to arrive at a similar argument when he contends that Gatsby is “the tool of capital (or capitals) – an object lesson to himself in the making and remaking of reality.”Footnote ¹⁵ Even the most recent scholarship in this vein, such as Barbara Will's excellent “The Great Gatsby and the Obscene Word” from 2005, eventually concludes that the novel's final transcendent scene depends upon forgetting Gatsby's earlier missteps and failures.Footnote ¹⁶ These accounts cast the American Dream in the novel as a kind of false consciousness. It ultimately breaks its promise of upward mobility by reverting to a genetic rather than cultural designation of identity. While, in Werner Sollors's terms, The Great Gatsby might present US identity as a matter of consent – various characters can choose to embrace the intrepid spirit that Gatsby, and to a lesser degree Nick, represent – access to US society's upper echelons is very much a matter of descent.Footnote ¹⁷ The novel thereby condemns its dreamers to lives of fruitless toil that inevitably devolve into disappointment or worse.

Yet scholarly accounts that make use of the American Dream in this way conflate the values assigned the novel in the moment of its canonization with the text of The Great Gatsby itself. By ignoring the history of Gatsby's Cold War reception, they fail to distinguish between Gatsby's representation of 1920s society and the construction of the American Dream as a distinct postwar historical formation that was largely inflected by the audiences that consumed the novel. Further, they can tell us little about Gatsby's later and continued appeal. While Baz Luhrmann's recent cinematic version of the novel might have flopped at the box office, its release prompted a deluge of articles, opinion pieces, and comments testifying to the widespread affection audiences continue to have for The Great Gatsby, particularly its “extraordinary gift for hope.”Footnote ¹⁸ If it were nothing more than an exercise in disappointment – a long-winded “gotcha!” – why would readers and viewers cling to a work that tells them that dreaming is a futile exercise?

Though Gatsby's first readers tended to focus on the novel's many romances and “the spirit of the age,” this emphasis changed dramatically in later years.Footnote ¹⁹ During the 1950s and 1960s, New Critics and other formalists sought to safeguard high art from consumer and mass culture. In doing so they created an “ideal order of eternal objects” that celebrated American art and civilization, consolidating the authority of American literature studies in the process, and in a way conveniently marketable as an export commodity to showcase US exceptionalism at the very moment when enthusiasm for American culture was starting to take off in a big way around the world.Footnote ²⁰ These critics frequently employed Adams's term “American Dream” to signal Gatsby's status as part of a great tradition of American novels grounded in distinctly American themes.

In fact, the expansion of domestic readership facilitated by acts such as the GI Bill is inextricable from Gatsby's canonization. In 1948 Bantam Books produced a “pocket-book”-sized edition of The Great Gatsby as part of its series of paperback “quarter books” costing only twenty-five cents and marketed to largely nonmetropolitan consumers. These quarter books, which were frequently vernacular novels such as romances and Westerns, were sold in conventional bookstores, the number of which grew to an unprecedented degree after the war, and in drugstores and groceries, making literature as easy to acquire as a sandwich or jug of milk.Footnote ²¹ This series skewed heavily towards tales of the frontier and US expansionism; as a middlebrow venture, the series largely paralleled the highbrow efforts of New Critics who sought to create an autochthonous US canon that testified to the legacy of European exploration in the Americas even as they appealed to a burgeoning and upwardly mobile middle class with a taste for tales of self-made and independent fortunes. While The Great Gatsby's inclusion could have damaged its growing reputation – the novel, in the end, has much in common with Westerns and popular romances – just the opposite occurred. In 1955, The Great Gatsby was listed in the English Journal as frequently assigned high-school reading, and public lectures, radio addresses, and literary spotlights about the work abounded during this period.Footnote ²²Gatsby proved a uniquely fungible text, emerging also as an important part of college syllabi in a wide variety of institutions. Those Cold War professors who rose up to defend Gatsby against accusations that it spoke merely to a particular moment in history rather than to more long-standing concerns taught at the oldest and most elite chambers of higher education, newly emergent land-grant universities, and even trade schools. More saliently, these educators insisted upon the widespread popularity and currency of the novel in their classes.Footnote ²³

Indeed, the very origins of Gatsby's newfound fame can be found in its appeal to a less rarefied reading public. Beginning in World War II, the Council on Books in Wartime, a civilian effort housed within the military, and later the CIA sponsored a wide variety of artistic products as part of a policy of soft diplomacy intended to counter Fascism and Communism abroad and at home.Footnote ²⁴Gatsby was one of the volumes held up as promoting “American” values and it in turn came to be read as paradigmatically American. Soon after its formation, the council decided to produce its own edition of The Great Gatsby for consumption by military servicemen, a group that drew heavily from the working and middle class: the novel has continuously been in print ever since.Footnote ²⁵ By the end of World War II, the council had distributed nearly 1·3 million books to troops deployed abroad, with the explicit aim of “uplifting” their spirits.Footnote ²⁶ Given this history, especially the class makeup of the US armed services, what does it mean to read The Great Gatsby as a novel with the power to uplift?

The desire for just this sentiment proves a major theme of the postwar political and cultural landscape. Following the end of the war, the publishing industry speedily responded to calls from black audiences for more diverse reading by producing books specifically tailored for African Americans and young adult fiction that featured minority children in a positive light.Footnote ²⁷The Great Gatsby was a frequent point of reference in literary editorials and features in periodicals owned by and directed towards African American readership, such as the Chicago Defender, throughout the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ²⁸ The evidence suggests, first, that audiences successfully leveraged their buying power to force the literary market to respond to their preferences, and, second, that these audiences sought out works that they felt resonated with their own personal experiences. Such a vast and engaged readership challenges the argument that Gatsby proved so popular because it merely represented the status quo. The status quo for whom?

Instead, in academic articles and literary spotlights, these voracious postwar readers relentlessly discuss the American Dream as an aspirational category that defines Gatsby's aesthetic and cultural project as well as the legacy it leaves to its artistic descendants. With surprising consistency, Cold War academics, journalists, and readers focused on the tragedy of the American Dream as represented in the figure of Jay Gatsby, a tragedy that depends upon the desire to re-create a corrupted past.Footnote ²⁹ David Dempsey echoed the opinions of professional critics when he wrote in the New York Times that Fitzgerald and his ilk evinced an “esthetic fatalism” predicated upon a belief that “to be disillusioned was a necessary condition for understanding the world.”Footnote ³⁰ These interests represent a different set of concerns from those of the 1920s and 1930s when reviewers and critics paid more attention to the book's failed romance plot and evocations of criminalized consumerism.Footnote ³¹ Instead, postwar writers turn to the dream itself, rather than the figures in pursuit of the dream.Footnote ³² They do so by following Edmund Wilson in focussing overwhelmingly upon Nick as storyteller at the expense of an unwavering gaze upon the objects of his stories. For Arthur Mizener and others, Nick acts as a tour guide into Gatsby's motivations and development and his insights into Gatsby's actions serve as a foil for the reader's growing understanding of the title character's plight.Footnote ³³ Equally notably, The Great Gatsby, as many critics have observed, compulsively rehearses the failure of the American Dream. Yet Adams imbedded failure within his definition of the phrase when he lamented that “too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of [the Dream].”Footnote ³⁴ For Adams, as for Gatsby's mid-century critics, the historical formation of the American Dream emerges only once it comes into doubt. Indeed, the first published essay to use the concept in conjunction with The Great Gatsby was titled “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Authority of Failure” by William Troy (1945).Footnote ³⁵

By formulating the American Dream in the novel as alluring despite its fundamental flaws, postwar critics' description of the American Dream aligns with Bloch's analysis of utopia. In his discussion of death and utopianism in the final volume of The Principle of Hope, Bloch casts death, total oblivion, and annihilation as the ultimate threat to utopianism.Footnote ³⁶ Death, unlike other states, represents a lack of futurity – the end of the present moment as a process of becoming – and of existence as manifested within the physical world. It therefore challenges utopia's temporal and physical dimensions simultaneously due to its inescapable nature. Yet by turning first to religious and religious-inspired representations of the afterlife, followed by a meditation upon secular responses to death, Bloch argues instead that death's very finality is the key to its utopian potential.Footnote ³⁷ Death, from this vantage point, represents the ultimate freedom, that which due to its inevitability and inescapability represents true authenticity and liberty. Moreover, despite the radically individualized experience of death, the fact that all beings will experience it transforms it into a fundamentally shared process.Footnote ³⁸ Ultimately, in providing a momentary stay against the transitory nature of existence, Bloch avers that the collective potential in death creates the condition for tragedies and heroes.Footnote ³⁹

Utopianism in this formulation thus encapsulates the negative without ever swallowing up or ignoring the prodding presence of death or other potential losses.Footnote ⁴⁰ José Esteban Muñoz elaborates on the role of negation and failure in Bloch's thesis by outlining the distinction Bloch made between concrete and abstract utopias. Unlike abstract utopias, which Bloch notes remain disconnected from any historical consciousness and therefore frequently slide towards fantasy or delusion, concrete utopias “are relational to historically situated struggles, a collectivity that is actualized or potential.”Footnote ⁴¹ For postwar audiences, the knowledge of Gatsby's impending doom does not nullify the temptations of the American Dream: as Bloch insists, the almost inevitable disappointment of utopian hope only amplifies its imaginative and transformational potential.Footnote ⁴² Like Bloch's view of utopianism, the Cold War version of the American Dream describes a future heavily indebted to the past rather than a current reality; it derives from a persistent dissatisfaction with one's circumstances and achievements. Even when highlighting the dream's relation to love in Fitzgerald's novel, Trilling among others did so to illustrate love's rotten roots, not its foibles or lapses: “we learn about a love – perhaps it is peculiarly American – that is destructive by reason of its very tenderness.”Footnote ⁴³ For Trilling, love in The Great Gatsby is undone by tenderness – one of its fundamental characteristics, not an unfortunate corollary of the ways characters use it. Trilling's reading raises the the question: how does a text that ends so wretchedly in a double murder-suicide come to stand in for American possibility?

II. AMERICAN DREAMERS, FAILURE, AND UTOPIA

To read The Great Gatsby as Cold War critics did is to look for failure and disappointment, rather than glory, as an indicator that Gatsby's dream is both enabled by its fundamental flaws and characteristically American. Doing so reveals that mid-century critics' canonization of Gatsby as paradigmatically American – and therefore broadly applicable – relied upon an illustration of the capacity for transcendence as born of a foundational and inescapable disappointment. Though the scene of Gatsby's death perhaps demonstrates this point most forcefully, The Great Gatsby's peculiar pattern of narration throughout the novel is intimately bound up with Gatsby's utopian final pages. Nick's tendency to straddle the lines between self and other begins to model the collectivity Bloch sees as central to utopianism. Through Nick's multivoiced narration, the novel constantly redraws the parameters of its various communities with a particular focus upon the losers, rather than the winners, of American aspiration. Focussing upon this group of outsiders helps explain how Cold War critics read Gatsby as a tragedy and, relatedly, the reasons why a diverse group of mid-century audiences saw Gatsby's dream as a synechdoche for the American Dream.

While Nick most frequently ventriloquizes Gatsby,Footnote ⁴⁴ he also takes on the voices of a virtual community of American Dreamers who circulate along the periphery of the American ideal that Tom and Daisy represent. For instance, when Nick relays Jordan's first-person testimony of the young Jay Gatsby's love for the then-unwed Daisy Fay, the novel delivers this foundational anecdote without quotation marks. Jordan's primary authorship is noted only once between parentheses – “(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)”Footnote ⁴⁵ – while the passage's frame, grammatical flourishes, and tone align it with many of Nick's personal reveries. In addition, Nick's fixed gaze upon Jordan's surroundings and the repetition of the word “straight” deemphasize the first part of the sentence, deflecting attention away from Jordan's ownership of the story. Like the many people who have sat in the “straight chair” that Jordan occupies at the Plaza, Nick implies that Jordan's words are open for occupation by others, himself in this instance.

These and similar examples of Nick's impositions into others' histories would be relatively unremarkable if they applied equally to all characters. Nick, though, proves a selective narrator, creating new communities that cut across class lines. Despite the relatively large amount of narrative attention devoted to Daisy and Tom, these two paradigmatic US subjects – rich, Anglo-Saxon, heirs to vast fortunes – remain closed off from Nick's psychic interventions. Though he often reports upon the pair's emotional state, such as when Tom breaks into tears after Myrtle's death, he does so to mirror these affects, rather than provide insight into their origins. Indeed, in his final interaction with Tom after Gatsby's death, Nick thinks, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Nick underscores the uncertainty he feels in regard to Tom and Daisy's interiority: he speculates about their actions, rather than their feelings, brushing off their motivations with the phrase “whatever it was that kept them together.”

Nick's focalization of certain characters as opposed to others bespeaks larger social pressures within the novel. Nick intervenes in the psyches of Jordan, Gatsby, Michaelis, and, to some degree, George Wilson, figures who all find themselves at the margins of the US aristocratic class that Tom and Daisy represent. These figures also largely approximate certain sectors of the newly educated and the professional during the postwar years, a fact that likely helped to endear certain characters to Cold War audiences at the expense of others. Despite her wealth, the unsportsmanlike, apparently parentless, and “vaguely homosexual”Footnote ⁴⁷ Jordan Baker shares a formal realm occupied by Gatsby, the rich gangster with dreams of legitimacy: virtual orphans, both seek wider acceptance by the overdetermined white world of Tom and Daisy. Like Nick, each member of this group is to varying degrees “uncivilized.”Footnote ⁴⁸ On the other end of the spectrum lie characters such as Meyer Wolfsheim. Recognizably other and unabashed about his underworld business, connections, and money, Wolfsheim neither can nor wants to enter Tom and Daisy's rarefied realm. Wilson, Gatsby, and Jordan are thus united formally by the ways the novel represents their interiority, but also by their relative lack of success, by their desire for something better, the very desire that defined postwar consumerism in both its ironic and credulous iterations.Footnote ⁴⁹ While the scandalous accusation that Jordan surreptitiously moved her golf ball for her own advantage in a match does not destroy her career, the only direct discussion of her professional life in the novel comes in the form of an apology: “Sorry you didn't win!” the two women in yellow dresses tell Jordan at the first of Gatsby's parties that Nick attends.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Adams avers in his definition of the American Dream, for many characters in The Great Gatsby the desire for success leads to disappointment. Yet this disappointment is apparently community-building. Success, whether sanctioned (in the case of Daisy and Tom) or illicit (Wolfsheim), distinguishes groups, while failure unites an otherwise disparate collection of characters into a cohesive whole.

The moment of Gatsby's death amplifies these narrative tensions and remains one of the most popular scenes among postwar critics who place the American Dream at the heart of the novel. In the passage, Nick's characteristic form of intersubjective psychic connection depends upon a version of American promise intimately bound up with the emptiness of New World possibility:

Nick here projects himself into Gatsby's mind, moving swiftly from a subjunctive speculation about Gatsby's thought processes to definitive and unverifiable statements about what Gatsby “must” have done. The second sentence contains the telling shift in mood: it begins the phrase with “if,” but lacks the subjunctive form of the verb “to be” – “were” rather than “was” – only one word later, as if to foreclose any possibility of doubt or misreading. Significantly, Nick gains this ability to intuit Gatsby's thoughts in the moments before his murder by trading upon a portrayal of Gatsby's dream as hollow to its core, a core that he traces to the very origins of modern European settlement in the hemisphere. This process amplifies Nick's interest, early in the novel, in origin stories by suggesting a predetermination to Gatsby's fatal end that Nick links to the Renaissance birth of the myth of the New World. Moreover, the novel reverses certain aspects of the typical Old World versus New World paradigm by portraying the Old World as one of happy delusion in contrast to a New World of disappointment and demise rather than promise. Even in this wholly disillusioned vision, though, the New World maintains several of its key features: “scarcely created” and therefore Edenic in its process of becoming, “immaterial” and haunted by ghosts like the spirits that plagued New England Puritans, much of what is recognizable in this vision inheres in the representation of the land. While the affect of this portrayal of Gatsby's dream clashes with stereotypical imaginings of the Americas as a place of opportunity, the landscape remains entirely recognizable. Though the passage constructs a distinctly homegrown genealogy for Gatsby's desires based in an early European presence in the New World, it does so to insist upon the doomed nature of this enterprise, rather than its infinite possibilities.

Nick's vision of the moment of Gatsby's death closely resembles both Bloch's description of utopia and Adams's insistence upon the American Dream's indebtedness to the US soil. In his discussion of Christianity and death, Bloch invokes the biblical figure of Job to unravel utopia's temporal and physical manifestations. Bloch contends that when Job gazes at the constellations he finds himself overwhelmed by the lack of consciousness of the universe, by, in other words, the way that oblivion surrounds all beings. Yet rather than succumbing to despair, Job surrenders himself to a “dissolution in the infinite.” In doing so, he allows himself to be absorbed by landscape, finding unity where previously there was only polarization.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, Adams insists, “If Americanism … has been a dream, it has also been one of the great realities of American life. It has been a moving force as truly as wheat or gold … It is Americanism, and its shrine has been in the heart of the common man.”Footnote ⁵³ Like Bloch's utopia, Adams's American Dream stitches a disparate population into a unified whole, elevating the “common man” to a position of greatness in the process. He bases this claim upon participation in this uniquely American and land-based endeavor as material as agricultural sustenance – wheat – or the fabled riches imbedded beneath the soil that served as the rallying call for both conquest and westward migration. The Great Gatsby thereby suggests that at the moment of his death Gatsby enacts a religious and secular version of the American Dream as utopia: in surrendering himself to his fate, he recognizes both the fleeting nature of the present and a universal imbeddedness within the American soil.

Despite the claims, then, of those critics who have argued that Gatsby's dream crumbles against the hard realities of class and racial exclusion, the passage suggests just the opposite. Nick presents Gatsby's fantasy as solid and warm, a dwelling that Gatsby successfully inhabited until it shattered against the immateriality of the New World. In fact, Nick calls George Wilson an “ashen, fantastic figure,” not an image out of the real world encroaching upon Gatsby's vision. Wilson has literally absorbed the most characteristic feature of the land upon which he lives: ashes. What transforms Wilson into a phantasm, then, is not an unsuccessful confrontation with cold reality but rather his absorption of it. Nick's meditation here thus indicts not Gatsby's dream of winning Daisy's favor, or even his earlier dream of greatness, but rather the dream dangled by the New World itself, a turn with widespread consequences for the other American Dreamers in the text. In this instance, Nick's revelation suggests first that the American Dream itself proves fatal, not because it corrupts people or destroys them, but because implicit in it is a kind of failure that is specified precisely by the terms of its hopefulness. Moreover, the source of this corruption leads back to the very invention of the New World qua New World by European explorers. If this revelation suggests a continuity between the theory of the New World and its materiality, it also dooms all of Gatsby's American Dreamers to a similar fate.

Indeed, Cold War critics were quick to note that the failure of Gatsby's dream in Fitzgerald's “American fable” stemmed from sources that preceded him and that extended past the individual circumstances of his tale, a clear nod to postwar interests in “distinct” American themes.Footnote ⁵⁴ References to the United States' pioneering origins suffuse the text and expand Nick's community beyond the closed circuit of characters explicitly introduced in the novel. When describing his trips home during university breaks, Nick reminisces,

The experience of traveling westward on a machine that facilitated US expansion and helped to suture the most distant parts of the country together momentarily allows Nick and his fellow passengers to see their place in US society at large. Though Nick casts this as a period of individuality, it passes quickly, and, as in his other philosophical ruminations, Nick asserts a universality to his thoughts through his use of the plural pronouns “our” and “we.” This intense moment of US regionalism, of existing both as individuals and as part of a collective whole, rests upon a repetition of the role of US explorer that proved particularly popular in both official and unofficial discourse during the Cold War. Here the Mid-west's interactions with the frontier spirit come to serve as a metonym for US nationalism. Nationalism thus recapitulates the past, both in terms of history and in terms of the earlier pages of the novel. Nick throws a backward-looking glance to earlier archetypes of US expansionism, themselves a turn-of-the-century construction that continued to evolve after World War II, as his solution to the horrifying events he witnessed in New York. While this anecdote initially comforts, it nonetheless closes by insisting that the origins of Gatsby's tragedy lie in the Mid-west: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all.” Nick's mimicry of the behaviors and poses of iconic New World prototypes – the conqueror, the settler, the explorer – suggest that despite being shared, the fantasy of escaping to a pure and uncorrupted prehistory is just that: a fantasy.

Nick's description of nationalism as a kind of mimicry and repetition en masse, particularly in regard to the past, amplifies another of the novel's formal features, one that many critics have noted suggests a recursive aspect to the New World's old horrors. The idea of a group of citizens, all uniformly unique and therefore interchangeably bound to the same destiny, explains Gatsby's desire to pursue his own aims by imitating those around him. Indeed, as the novel progresses, Gatsby increasingly echoes the other characters, repeating their phrases with only a slight shift in tone to alter the meaning. For instance, when Nick tells Gatsby, “You can't repeat the past,” Gatsby responds, “Can't repeat the past? … Why of course you can!”Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, the morning after Tom reveals Gatsby's illegal activities and illegitimate background, a disclosure that causes Daisy to withdraw from Gatsby, and ultimately kill Myrtle Wilson while driving Gatsby's car, Gatsby reasons, “Of course [Daisy] might have loved [Tom], just for a minute, when they were first married – and loved me more even then, do you see?”Footnote ⁵⁷ The utterance hearkens back to Daisy's lament the day before that “I did love [Tom] once – but I loved [Gatsby] too.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Like Nick's constant replaying of origin stories, these circular speech patterns find a corollary in the degree to which the novel loops back on itself in its final pages, rehearsing earlier narrative moves and events. Nick fantasizes that Tom leaves him after their final meeting in order to buy a pearl necklace or a set of cuff buttons, an echo of the pearl necklace Tom bought Daisy before their marriage, and of Wolfsheim's human molar cuff links, respectively. Similarly, the broken fender on Gatsby's car after it hits Myrtle recalls the wheel that came off Tom's car when he crashed it, which in turn refers back to the wheel ripped off a car at the end of one of Gatsby's parties. Yet rather than giving solace, these repetitions, particularly towards the close, increasingly portray the American Dream as an inescapable cultural condition that defines Americans. It simultaneously precedes the process of individualizing and continues after characters conform to the social norm. The locus of despair, it dooms all equally.

Likewise, the disenchanted tenor that dominates the novel's final pages mirrors Nick's description of East Egg's and West Egg's geographical features at the start of the tale as appearing crushed flat like the egg in the Columbus story. The parallel between the novel's beginning and end suggests a tautological cycle: the American Dream, as it intersects with the New World, closes in on itself. Gatsby's failure, by this logic of repetitiveness and disenchantment, was predetermined from the start; he just failed to realize it. These vacillations across the novel's diegesis, despite Nick's protests to the contrary, compound the sense of failure that suffuses Gatsby's death by suggesting that the past does repeat, always ending in the same place only to begin the process anew.

In the novel's final pages, Nick's relentlessly cited, lyrical meditation upon Dutch sailors' first glimpse of Manhattan in the sixteenth century brings these concerns to a head:

As many critics have noted, the passage links wonder to “the last and greatest of all human dreams” rather than its realization. The fact that Nick refrains from naming the dream proves a significant elision: he leaves the dream a floating signifier, an invitation to readers to interpret this lacuna and fill it with their own objects. Such formlessness is a key attribute of Bloch's vision of utopia due to its fundamentally unrealized state. Nick's melancholy register and his insistence upon the very brevity of the state of possibility – “for a transitory enchanted moment” and “for the last time in history” – dramatize the aesthetic disappointment that inevitably results from the conquest of the Americas. Similarly, as in many other passages, Nick's imaginative musings allow him momentarily to inhabit the subject position of sixteenth-century Dutch explorers – a subject position to which he, living nearly four centuries after their arrival, should have no access. Nick's reverie, like Bloch's utopia, depends upon the nascent qualities of the Dutch explorers' vision as a fundamentally unrealized state. The experience of nostalgic wonder, or dreaming, briefly dissolves the subjective boundaries between time and place, as well as self and other – a kind of parable of the experience both of nationalism and reading.

This final moment, though, differs from other passages by arriving as the novel's last statement upon Gatsby, his dream, and affective communities. Nick describes the Dutch sailors' vision of what would become the island of Manhattan as the “last and greatest” of all human dreams, suggesting singularity for the first time. Unlike other mentions of the New World and dreaming throughout the novel, this dream, whatever it might be, seals all others: there can be no more. In addition, for the first and only time, interpretation pivots explicitly to the reader. The elusive note upon which the penultimate paragraph ends, “And one fine morning”Footnote ⁶⁰ – as well as the persistent use of the pronoun “we” – opens the tale to the audience, in the same way that Nick has opened the characters' tales to himself. Indeed, the text even dictates the path, “born back ceaselessly into the past,” a set of uncannily prophetic instructions given Cold War audiences' desire to repeat the past in order to correct it, at least in terms of canonization. Muñoz's gloss on the distinction between “possibility” and “potentiality,” as Bloch describes the terms, amplifies the seeming inevitability of Gatsby's rise. In his reading of Agamben, Muñoz explains that the concept of possibility constructs the future in terms of a variety of outcomes, none more likely than any other. Conversely, potentiality describes a future anchored in the particularities of the present and therefore eminent, if not inevitable.Footnote ⁶¹ In this final scene, Nick gestures to potentiality, rather than possibility: he indicates a transformative opportunity on the horizon while still leaving it conditioned and constituted by failure.

III. SO WE BEAT ON

In the novel's final moments, the text invites readers to consume the story as Nick has consumed it, to interpret and speak for others, including them in the novel's program. The danger of the offer, the knowledge that it has failed in the past and most likely will in the future, is the key to its utopian appeal. Cold War readers, after all, knew what their predecessors did not: that Gatsby's spectacular demise was merely a harbinger of the financial calamity to come. To read The Great Gatsby as Cold War readers did is to find in the novel a statement on justice, one that sees the past as inescapable and the American Dream as potentially unforgiving and out of reach.

Considering the American Dream as a complex utopian structure in the novel reveals the centrality of immanent corruptibility to the novel's utopian portrayal of the American Dream, and concomitantly its aesthetic transportability. Indeed, these various inflections of the meaning and use of the American Dream underscore Gatsby's potential to trigger certain cultural iterations at one moment, while triggering different readings at others. Despite this fatalism, Bloch reminds us that the immanence of Gatsby's death does not make it inevitable. While the past, with all its injustices, may have caught up with Gatsby's protagonist, reading the American Dream as a utopia which reading communities themselves construct, rather than having it foisted upon them, gives us new insight into why so many have cherished the novel as a call to beat against the current.