It was on April 10, 1925, that Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby – the defining portrait of the Jazz Age’s extravagance and glamour aimed at achieving “vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty of material success” sans moral cudgels— adorned the shelves of book stalls.

Much against the author’s expectations, it was greeted by tepid reviews and disappointing sales. But Fitzgerald said, “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.” Its sales were so-so, and by the time of the author’s death in 1940, copies of the modest second print run remained with the book stalls for a long time.

But with World War II drawing to a close, Gatsby’s popularity changed: this 200-page novel was distributed in a special Armed Services Edition of around 155000 copies, creating a new readership overnight. And, come the 1950s, the booming American dream – the pursuit of what William James, the American philosopher, once called “bitch goddess success” – hastened the topicality of the novel and by the 60s it became an enshrined text of America.

The storyline of The Great Gatsby—the tragic tale of a self-made millionaire of Long Island is very simple. Tom and Daisy, an absurdly wealthy couple, live on Long Island. Daisy rekindles an affair with Jay Gatsby—the protagonist of the novel, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion in West Egg—her former lover. Gatsby is known to throw extravagant parties every Saturday night. Indeed, his over-generous lifestyle and his wild parties are simply meant to impress Daisy. But when her husband Tom, the arrogant and chronically unfaithful, confronts them, Daisy retreats into her marriage.

Later, driving Gatsby’s car, Daisy accidentally kills Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, in a hit-and-run incident. Daisy doesn’t stop to help the victim; instead continues to drive on, leaving the dead body on the road. Later, Gatsby takes the blame on himself. After that, Tom and Daisy flee, abandoning Gatsby to his ruin.

Having learnt from Tom that Gatsby was the driver of the car that killed his wife, George, the husband of Myrtle, shoots him dead. Nick, the narrator of Gatsby’s life in the novel, arranges a small funeral for Gatsby, but nobody turns up. Daisy didn’t even send flowers. Thus ends the dream of Gatsby for Daisy.

The novel’s beauty, however, lies in its narration, particularly the reflections of Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, on all that he noticed happening around Gatsby— the state of American dream; the bedazzling and corrupting power of money; the fall of moral values; Gatsby’s belief in the green light at the end of the Daisy’s dock, the orgastic future of winning Daisy; etc—are very pragmatic and are relevant even in today’s context. That is what made the novel last this long, sparking numerous discussions and debates about its relevance and impact.

Sarah Churchwell, professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London commenting that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, a socially realistic novel about the people he saw in the world around him, observed that “characters like Tom – rich, entitled and stupid – are still here in America, searching for ideologies to justify their dominance”.

Reflecting on the trait of unaccountable elites, Fitzgerald mouths Nick with a definitive statement: “They [Tom and Daisy] were careless people … 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, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Carelessness, in the opinion of Fitzgerald, “is more than negligence—it is a way of wielding power”. Their money-power affords them an element of certainty—certainty that the world exists to absorb the damage inflicted by them.

The novel is known for its rich symbolism. All through, we come across the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock as a symbol of Gatsby’s hope to reunite with his lost love, Daisy. Gatsby’s belief in it as “the orgastic future” is so intense that when Nick saw him for the first time, he was standing alone in the dark with his arms outstretched toward that green light. Nick, admiring Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope”, compares his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” with that of the early settlers’ hope in the promise of the new world.

Nevertheless, Gatsby’s romantic dream for Daisy is misplaced and ultimately destructive, but his faith in it asserts that he has at least retained his soul. Towards the end of the novel, Nick reflects on Gatsby’s belief thus: “… the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”, which “eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther …” In his metaphoric language, Nick reminds the reader that human beings struggle to achieve their goals by both transcending and re-creating the past. Yet, according to Nick, humans prove themselves to be unable to move beyond the past. That is the melancholy of Gatsby’s life: he expends all his energy in the pursuit of a goal that moves ever farther away.

Reflecting on the “American dream”, which is one of the big themes of The Great Gatsby, William Cain, an expert in American literature and the Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, points out thus: “Fitzgerald shows that that dream is very powerful, but that it is indeed a very hard one for most Americans to realise. It feeds them great hopes, great desires, and it's extraordinary, the efforts that so many of them make to fulfil those dreams and those desires, but that dream is beyond the reach of many, and many, they give up all too much to try to achieve that great success".

The story of Gatsby of class divides, moral depravity, and the death of the American dream ends with Nick reflecting: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”.

But the question remains: What else can we do, if not to keep beating on, rowing our boats relentlessly, but without aspiring for the result?