Extra: Gatsby, The White Lotus, and the Crash of 2025

This post contains a spoiler for the season three finale of The White Lotus. 

Two days ago, the Empire State Building glowed green to commemorate the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby’s publication. Jay Gatsby’s green light symbolizes optimism, hope, redemption—and money. But the Empire State Building might just as well have been lit up in red to represent the stock market’s precipitous collapse due to Trump’s reckless economic policy.

Gatsby came out at the height of the Roaring Twenties, a period marked by bootleg gin, cultural amnesia, and wild parties. 

I first read the novel for its plot in 1978, and later that year, I reread it in my favorite high school English class, which focused on the twenties and thirties. I gained an understanding of the post-war world, Prohibition, and literary symbolism. I also learned about the crash of 1929, which brought rapid sobriety to a nation intoxicated by wealth and status. Sound familiar?

Water is a symbol everywhere in Gatsby, reflecting internal struggle and rebirth and ultimately prefiguring the protagonist's demise in his swimming pool.

One hundred years later, the symbol of water served an almost identical purpose in the hit TV series The White Lotus. It emphasized emotional tumult and ultimately foreshadowed Rick being shot and left to die in a beautiful pond surrounded by white lotuses. His lust for revenge brought his downfall.

The White Lotus shows how great wealth brings great problems. Gatsby, like the guests at The White Lotus, thought money could buy him happiness. The universe had other plans.

It seemed fitting that on Thursday, after the cruel tease of a historic stock market rally, the rain fell in buckets here in Cleveland just as the Dow plunged to erase Wednesday's temporary gains. Scott Fitzgerald would have admired the symbolism.

I hope that one hundred years from now, whether a national Department of Education still exists or even if the United States remains as we know it, The Great Gatsby will still be taught in schools. The way we once lived matters; literature and the past matter.

As Nick Carraway concluded, “We beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

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