One of the requirements to earn my MA in Literature from Clemson was the successful completion of an oral examination that spanned thousands of years in literary history and covered over 100 novels, stories, plays and poems. I spent several months preparing for what I anticipated would be the greatest challenge of my academic career. The duration of the exam lasted a little over an hour. I passed.

I remember bits and pieces from the exam. The most notable question posed by Dr. Paul was, simply, was Gatsby great? On the surface it would seem that The Great Gatsby’s title character is great merely because the novel’s title implies as much. That said, there are certainly many literary scholars who would argue the point. I am not one of them.

The Great Gatsby became one of my favorite novels the first time I read it during my junior year of high school. I couldn’t count the number of times I have reread it since then, but each of the copies I own has hand-written notes in the margins, highlighted passages and discussion points that interest me. Among the myriad reasons this novel is one of my favorites, there is one quote that stands out above the rest.

The narrator of the novel describes Gatsby in the first chapter saying “if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.… [Gatsby had] 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.”

While things end poorly for Gatsby in the end, it is his “extraordinary gift for hope” that has always made his character attractive – great – for me. Hope is a powerful and amazing thing. Hope is the light at the end of the tunnel when the beginning of it is desperately dark and discouraging. Hope provides sustenance to the soul in the same way food nourishes the body. Hope inspires faith and dreams and makes possibilities limitless. Hope encourages people to strive for those things that others have discounted as impossibilities.

I want to have hope – hope for the present and hope for the future. Despite obstacles and adversities, I yearn to maintain an unfailing hope in the promise of what might be or what could be or what is to come. Imagine where we would be without hope? Without hope, scientists would not strive to discover cures for life-threatening illnesses. Without hope, would man have walked on the moon? Would Obama be president? Would children survive abusive upbringings and grow into adulthood?

Gatsby never wavered in his hope, and this is what makes him amazing. Holding onto hope can be extremely difficult at times – especially when it feels like the deck of life is stacked against you. The other option, of course, is to be hopeless. Hopelessness greatly diminishes possibility, potential and drains the spirit. Even when our hopes do not come to fruition in the ways we have anticipated, having hope to carry us forward beats the alternative. In the words of Winston Churchill – “never, never, never give up!”