The Nature of Art, the Deletion of Gatsby

What would the world be like without The Great Gatsby? I am thinking absolutely here. If we took Gatsby out of the world entire, what would the world look like?

Would the world notice? Would it truly be impacted?

After all, there are other stories about the American Dream, other protagonists that go for it all and fail due to a tragic yoking to the past. Right? Nick Carraway doesn't corner the market on a friend who cares too little too late; Tom isn't the only jerk; Wilson not the only man swallowed by life's circumstance; Daisy isn't the worst (she is the worst, but for the sake of argument).

What makes Gatsby so blasted special?

Isn't it the very heart of the book, the very fact that Mr. Fitzgerald somehow captures, like bits of the Skittles rainbow, the essence of Gatsby's fantastic capacity for hope and somehow translates it onto the page, to stand as cool and poignant and refreshing as Gatsby himself?

Isn't it because, despite ourselves, we love Gatsby and also we love what props him up? Isn't it because of the hope?

We want hope. We want to know where it resides, how to get at it, what to do with it once we have it. The tragic component here, I believe, is the fact that Gatsby's hope fails him. Or rather, how he commends himself to life based on that hope fails him. Gatsby is a dreamer, a Romantic, a man in love trying to sustain the best parts of himself in a world that devours sustainability. Gatsby doesn't change, but, then, neither does his hope.

Yet as good as that sounds (and I don't know how good it sounds, not at all...), let us not forget, gentle reader, that Gatsby fails. He goes down. Hard. Life gets him. Tom Buchanan wins. Gatsby, and his life and his figurative goodness all get exploded by brutish acts. No shiny veneer then. The Great Gatsby is about the failed American Dream; it is about how Idealism is Naivety; it argues against the notion that a person can cling to good and make good happen. What then? Where do we go from here?

Shouldn't Gatsby be driven out of the world? It is a book of lies, of awfulness packaged in million-dollar wrapping paper. It is a book that causes hope. And hope is dangerous. Because hope is not sustainable. Right?

And so we beat on, ... oh you know the rest.