F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is known to be a uniquely American novel that reflects the social milieu of the American 1920s, also known as the “Jazz Age” or the “Roaring Twenties.” 

In this monumental novel, Fitzgerald laments the loss of innocence and the demise of the American pastoral dream in the age of hedonism and materialism. Readers come to realize that Gatsby was the last Romanticist who naively believed in the pure, pastoral American Dream, symbolized by the green light on the deck of East Egg, New York.

In the book, Fitzgerald shows that Gatsby does not grasp that the days of innocence and romanticism are over, and that he can never restore the past. The narrator, Nick Carraway, does a superb job of observing and recording the degradation of American society in the 1920s through his encounter with the mysterious Gatsby.

“The Great Gatsby” has been made into a film five times. Among them, I like the 1974 version the most, in which Robert Redford and Mia Farrow appear as Gatsby and Daisy. In the movie, Redford splendidly plays a pure, naive American hero who is hopelessly destroyed by his own innocence and others’ selfishness. Nevertheless, Redford fails to reveal the darker side of Gatsby, who made a fortune presumably off of bootlegging. In this version, Gatsby is simply a good, innocent guy ruined by insincere, careless and materialistic people. Meanwhile, Farrow perfectly plays an extremely frivolous woman who is driven by vanity and lacks substance, and is therefore thoroughly untrustworthy. Sam Waterston captures Nick Carraway successfully, embodying a solitary, intellectual Yalie, who is deeply disillusioned by the inhumane, materialistic East Coast.

As for the 2013 version, Neil Schmitz, a professor emeritus at SUNY/Buffalo, insightfully comments on each character on his blog, “The Blake Pond.”

“Toby Maguire was too much a dweezil, in too tight Harold Lloyd boy man suits, too innocent and earnest. He plays Nick Carraway as an emotional train wreck, plays him as a person without any trace of cool.” Indeed, it is true that Maguire’s face seriously lacks intellectual agony and a sense of alienation, which are integral features of Nick Carraway. Perhaps a more serious and stern man would have worked better.

Professor Schmitz praises Leonardo DiCaprio who plays Gatsby. He writes, “Leonardo DiCaprio, give the boy his due. I thought I was looking at the young Orson Welles, the voice, the stature. He was strong in every scene.” Indeed, DiCaprio superbly exhibited the dark side of Gatsby, skillfully handling the calls from the Chicago mob in a deep voice, while maintaining the fresh image of a charming, innocent man who naively believed he could restore the past.

Except for DiCaprio, Schmitz’s comments on the movie are not so favorable. For example, Schmitz says, “Carey Mulligan is too pudgy for her part, too pudgy and too damp,” for Daisy. Referring to Joel Edgerton who played Tom Buchanan, Schmitz writes, “Joel Edgerton is too small, too ordinary in his looks. You want Rock Hudson shoulders on Tom Buchanan.” But Schmitz was generous about the setting of the movie, “The sets indoors and out, were fabulous, a tad overdone, but what the hell, it is a Hollywood movie.”

“The Great Gatsby” is a uniquely American movie depicting the 1920s, a time when Americans were intoxicated by material abundance and mundane pleasures. Strangely, however, “The Great Gatsby” has long been a steady-seller, if not a bestseller, in Korea. Of course, the release of the movies with the same title surely contributed to a boost in sales of the book. Yet, it puzzles me why Koreans like the novel so much. Equally disturbing is that most Koreans I have met and discussed the novel with do not seem to understand why Gatsby is “great,” and why Nick Carraway admires Gatsby so much

Recently, a Korean reviewer wrote, “Gatsby was not great. He was just a persistent man who could not give up his ex-girlfriend.” Perhaps he must have read the novel superficially. Gatsby was great because he had never lost innocence and humanity even in the age of materialism. Gatsby was great because he believed in the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and was willing to sacrifice himself for his beloved one. He just did not know that Daisy had been tainted, corrupted and degraded. Gatsby was killed in his green pool by the foul conspiracy of Tom and Daisy. And his dream was shattered by a machine fired by a mechanic who mistook Gatsby as the killer of his wife.
Gatsby was killed because he was a dreamer. Unfortunately, many dreamers have been killed by machines, like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. But regardless of their short lives on Earth, these dreamers were great, for they dreamed even in bleak, nightmarish landscapes. That is why Nick Carraway confessed that in Gatsby he perceived “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”

By Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. He can be reached at sukim@snu.ac.kr. ― Ed.