Author's Note
Author’s Note
This project began with a conversation.
A college professor mentioned that he would be teaching The Great Gatsby in his first-year English literature class in the coming semester. We talked about why the novel has endured—its themes of ambition, class, longing, and self-invention—and how each new generation seems to find its own reflection inside it.
Not long after, it struck me how easily Gatsby’s world could be translated into our own.
The social rituals have changed. The technology has changed. The vocabulary has changed. But the systems—the ones that reward visibility, protect power, and quietly discard people when they’re no longer useful—remain remarkably familiar.
Filtered is my attempt to explore those parallels.
A Brief Note on the Original
The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, follows Nick Carraway as he becomes entangled in the world of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire obsessed with reclaiming a past love. Set against the backdrop of wealth, excess, and rigid social class, the novel interrogates the American Dream—who is allowed to pursue it, who is protected by it, and who is ultimately consumed by it.
Though Gatsby’s story is often remembered for its glamour, the novel itself is deeply skeptical of the systems that produce that glamour. It is a story about aspiration, illusion, and the quiet cruelty of social machinery that continues long after individual lives are lost.
Its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was himself no stranger to these tensions. Writing during the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald chronicled a generation intoxicated by success and haunted by its costs. The Great Gatsby was not a commercial success in his lifetime, but it has since become one of the most widely read and taught American novels—a testament to how slowly some truths reveal their value.
Why This Retelling Exists
My intention with Filtered is not to replace the original, but to stand beside it.
This retelling is offered freely to students, instructors, and readers who are curious about how a familiar story might look when refracted through modern systems of influence, visibility, and control. It is designed to invite comparison, discussion, and questioning—not to provide answers, but to create space for them.
If this book encourages even one reader to return to The Great Gatsby with fresh eyes, or to consider how today’s systems shape the people inside them, then it has done what I hoped it would do.
— Jai Montag
