Gatsby’s Green Light and the Need for Obstinance

I just completed reading The Great Gatsby for nearly the 40th time with my current crop of students. If only I, as a teacher, could use the novel to properly teach students to connect its message to the current mess we’re in. It’s filled with many iconic literary quotes, but this one often runs under the radar—yet it has always caught my attention.

“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The American Dream has been slipping out of view for quite some time, drifting further beyond the reach of most Americans. In a matter of days, millions will find themselves drowning under rising health insurance premiums as ACA subsidies expire. Income inequality is surging at a historic pace. Tariff increases—among the highest in over a century—are quietly extracting nearly $2,000 more per household, all while wages lag and protections erode.

This is what Fitzgerald understood: Americans will tolerate hardship for a time, but they have always resisted systems that demand permanent submission. The danger is not that the green light has disappeared—it’s that we’ve been trained to stop swimming toward it.

The green light may be obscured by fog, but it has not been extinguished. What’s required now is not nostalgia or cynicism, but obstinacy—deliberate, moral resistance to a future that tells us to settle for less dignity, less security, and less hope.

The question Gatsby leaves us with is not whether the dream is dead.

It’s whether we are still stubborn enough to demand it.

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