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Gatsby’s story is a story of obsession. Like a group of young girls heading off to X Factor auditions or a bunch of lads at a pre-party, riling themselves up for the night ahead with Kanye videos on YouTube, Gatsby has spent much of his life aspiring to be a different, wealthier person. Like a lovelorn romantic scrolling through pictures of his ex on Facebook, Gatsby sits in his garden staring at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Sure, it’s weirder and more poetic than opening up that “Beach Holiday 2010” album, but the intention is the same. He’s obsessed with a lifestyle and he’s obsessed with a person. Neither makes him happy.The internet actively encourages us to do 25-to-life in an emotional prison where the guards are ex-lovers and our rehabilitation arrives through a series of bitter realisations. Every conversation we ever have on our preferred IM platform (I’m all about the in-built chat function on chess.com, FYI) is stored for all time. “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” Gatsby exclaims. And like Gatsby, we can constantly re-imagine the happiness we once felt, constantly castigate ourselves for thinking it would be a good idea to drop a winking emoji into every other sentence while imagining a future in which the past will be blissfully re-created. In the novel, Daisy is shown to be unworthy of Gatsby’s obsession, but of course the level of obsession that leads someone to spend every evening staring at a light for hours on end isn’t real. It isn’t real like a picture on a screen isn’t real.
This obsession and loneliness is at the heart of what still makes The Great Gatsby current. Like a Drake video, the party swirls around Gatsby but never really grabs him. He’s just so lonely and deep. Boredom, nihilism and pleasure are king. His parties still represent what so many people aspire to. His loneliness and obsession still represent what so many people feel, just without the questionable blanket of money. In a culture that is more and more about the individual, in which more and more songs are about snatched nights of hedonism amid bleak days of pain, Gatsby is a sort of patron saint.
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