This is to be expected, of course, and because I participated in the self-cataloguing as much as the next flapper, I have no place to file a complaint. Still, I couldn’t help but consider the vista from beneath that great literary parasol that shaded my perception of the whole spectacle: The Great Gatsby.
The novel has experienced a revival of late thanks to the big budget Baz Luhrmann film adaptation last year, but the American epic never really recedes from our social periphery. Perhaps the mark of a true classic is that every generation feels that its message applies to their time. Whatever the case, I think that its core directive speaks to us now in a unique way.
The Great Gatsby captures the fragility of a nation on the precipice of modernity; it calls to light the shallowness of decadence. But more than any of that, it captures the destructiveness of living out a fantasy. Jay Gatsby believed that if he remade himself, choosing to ignore and bury all the parts of himself he believed Daisy would reject, that she would love him again. He believed that he could craft his own identity—curate it, cultivate it, build it into a dazzling mansion filled with glittering parties and crisp shirts—and that if he did, he could reclaim the love he’d been waiting for. Moreover, because he believed so desperately in his own delusions, he was willing to grant everyone else their self-deceptions. Narrator Nick Carraway says Gatsby “understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that he had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
Nearly a century later, the instinct and capacity to project our ideal “fantasy” personas to a throng of casual acquaintances has never been more a part of our lives. At a party created for the sole purpose of escaping to the past, the escapism we seek first is the fantasy of our current images, as distilled through our social media filters. We put them up to be seen by all the other Gatsbys, who will willingly believe our lives are filled with glittering parties and crisp shirts—if we’ll just agree to believe the same thing about theirs.
And the sad thing is that more often than we realize, we do. And every time we check our phones to count the “likes” on a post, we are tallying the evidence that we have offered the world “precisely the impression of us that, at our best, we hoped to convey.” The trouble is that the picture you took down because it only got one “like” might have been the truest image of yourself—but you will bury it because no one else found it interesting enough to like.
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