More on Gatsby and a joke
From Fitzgerald’s novel:
“In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I have been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember all the people in this world have not had the advantages you’ve had.'”
The sentences come to mind when I hear African-Americans speak of “white privilege” in the past few years. Yes, minorities, our problems aren’t the same and probably not as severe as yours, but we still have them, even if we have socio-economic advantage. My youth was ” privileged” in some ways, but it was certainly not easy.
To me the brilliance of the novel is that Gatsby earns his privilege, but he does it for the wrong reasons, wanting a woman who is beyond his reach. “What you want most is what is what you don’t have.”
Apologies to the last line of John Milton’s great short poem “On His Blindness”. I found this was in his first draft:
“Those also serve who only mast or bate.”