Fitzgerald had to kill off his own famous striver because, to the author, Gatsby represented a dying American dream based on making it the hard way. But no such grim fate awaits today’s little Gatsbys. When they peer out at the universe, they don’t see a green dock light blinking from an unbridgeable distance where the Establishment folk live. This is the age of the red camera light, where everyone arrives sooner or later, if only for a moment, and nobody ever dies of ambition or shame.