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Why this unkillable mantra about the preeminent American novel? The Russians, the French, and the Spanish don’t long for “the great Russian novel,” and so forth. Why should we? Like Australia, which is also obsessed with the Great Australian Novel, we’re a mega-sized ex-British colony with a long history of hypersensitivity to the gap between size and aspiration versus reputation as a cultural wasteland.

What first drew me to the subject of the Great American Novel idea was the strange obstinacy of its persistence for more than a century after the conditions that brought it into being seemed passé. After reading hundreds of candidates and thousands of critical commentaries on those books, it dawned on me that the leading contenders, as a group, offer us something uncannily close to a DNA scan of the American imagination.

Rarely can we pinpoint a date when a new literary fashion or cultural trend began. When did the Renaissance displace the Middle Ages? What was the first novel? Such questions lead to endless wrangling over firstness. But for the Great American Novel, we know precisely when it entered public culture as an idea with legs: January 9, 1868, in an essay by a now-forgotten Connecticut novelist, J. W. DeForest.

The timing makes sense. It was a watershed moment in national history.

Writing just after the Civil War, DeForest argued that with the country now reunified, fiction writers should stop concentrating on its separate regions, as Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper had done, and take in the country’s expansive sweep and social tapestry so as to capture “the national soul.” Revealing his own Yankee provincialism, DeForest proposed that the closest approximation to date was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). (Ironically, he praised its rich array of characters and places North and South and not its anti-slavery thrust, wrongly supposing that Appomattox had put the race issue to rest.)

Yet his essay was well timed. The novel was just coming into high fashion in the United States. The call for the Great American Novel was calculated to appeal to its audience’s lingering embarrassment at its cultural dependence on European models. American writers and readers were acutely sensitive, rightly or wrongly, about the gap between the country’s growing industrial might and its relative underperformance in the areas of art and culture.

All this explains the birth of the Great American Novel idea much better than its persistence, long after it became clear that American literature had nothing to apologize for. From 1930 through the 1990s, American writers garnered a disproportionate share of Nobel prizes, and U.S. literature became the dominant player in the English-speaking world. If anxiety about legitimizing our claim to culture were the whole story, by all rights the Great American Novel mantra should have long since disappeared.

But it hasn’t, mostly because of two other intertwined factors that relate to the issue of national identity and also the particular characteristics of the U.S. literary scene during the last century and a half.

Factor one: Even before the Revolution, the land that became the United States was widely seen by its white settlers, by its leaders, and by foreign observers in futuristic terms, as a project in the making, founded on the promises that would come to be enshrined in the Declaration of Independence (life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness), yet struggling ever since to make good on them. So long as the nation remains the primary diaspora of choice for the rest of the world, that view of this country as a place that is or ought to be exceptional will continue, but with it also chagrin at the shortfall between national is and national ought. Serious U.S. writers have gravitated to that space in between, casting themselves as the conscience rather than the cheering section. The overwhelming majority of the dozen or so Great American Novel candidates taken most seriously, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, have shunned flag-waving patriotism and concentrated on the gap between promise and delivery. American audiences proverbially love feel-good plots and happy endings, but not when it comes to assessing Great American Novel candidates (or when the Academy picks contenders for the Oscar for “Best Picture,” for that matter).

Furthermore, the nation’s geography and social tapestry has become so much more complicated than when the original 13 rebellious British colonies uneasily allied in the 1770s—although it was plenty complicated even then—that it’s become an increasingly formidable challenge to pin down one “American experience” or “national identity.” The challenge of pinning down so huge and increasingly heterogeneous a moving target is particularly visible in such monumental, encyclopedic Great American Novel nominees as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. All this has guaranteed the Great American Novel will remain a future prospect rather than an achieved result.

This brings us to factor two: Within a generation after DeForest, it became pretty much accepted that the Great American Novel was to be a plural disguised as a singular—a series of literary assaults rather than a once-and-for-all definitive work. After all, nobody really wanted that anyway—a book to end all books. What would writers and readers do for an encore? This tacit understanding ensured both that the Great American Novel dream would continue to thrive, and that discussion of candidates would tend to become shrouded in a fog of contentious impressionistic blather.

By connecting the family resemblances between favored novels with favored lines of argument about what a Great American Novel should be, however, I was able to identify a certain number of specific scripts or scenarios that seemed especially promising for generating the 20 or so leading Great American Novel candidates, from The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the earliest-written top candidates) to the turn of the 21st century. My book The Dream of the Great American Novel focuses on four such scripts, which taken together offer something a virtual map of the force fields that have shaped national fiction as a whole. One is immortalization through multiple retellings, whether in fiction or film or any other artistic medium, of a particular novel’s plotline, like the saga of the embattled heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Another is the family saga that grapples with racial and other social divisions, often turning on a plot of love or friendship across the divides. Still another targets assemblages of characters who dramatize in microcosm the promise and pitfalls of democracy.

Perhaps the single most popular and durable script of all follows the life struggle of a focal figure—conventionally, but not always male—who strives to transform himself or herself from obscurity to prominence. Favored candidates, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, unfold as inquests into the promise and perils of the homegrown culture myth of “the self-made man.” In the process, they showcase two further points as well.

First, most Great American Novel scripts are distinctive but not unique to U.S. literature. (The U.S. remains, rightly or wrongly, the proverbial land of opportunity, but upward mobility plots pervade world literature.) Second, the scripts change over time. Before 1930, the protagonists of American up-from novels were overwhelmingly white and American-born; since then, a far greater percentage have been immigrants and people of color. Readers in 2050, then, shouldn’t be surprised to find the favored scripts altered considerably from 2015, and the distinctions between U.S. and other literatures even more porous.

But will the Great American Novel idea itself continue to outlive the “American Century,” as the 20th became called? Only time will tell. But whatever that future may be, my years of studying Great American Novel-ism have convinced me that despite appearances to the contrary, the vast and expanding field of American fiction isn’t just a haphazard centrifuge. Despite how loosely it gets slung about, Great American Novel talk reflects the core logics underlying the often sharp, surprising twists and turns of its long history. And key to the impetus that drives the seemingly unkillable dream is the myth of the United States itself as a culture of aspiration, even and indeed especially when those aspirations seem balked or betrayed, as our greatest novelists again and again have shown.

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This ideological impulse—which I and others call “voluntarism”—is a cultural trait that helps explain why the United States remains different from comparable wealthy, Western nations. Broadly speaking, voluntarism is not another term for American individualism, although it entails individualism. Voluntarism is the way Americans reconcile individualism and community. And we can feel the weight of American voluntarism in our approaches to public issues, not only in charter schools, but in debates about issues like Obamacare and gay marriage as well.

Other Western nations, by contrast, consider healthcare a civil right of citizens and a moral obligation of government. American tradition, however, treats healthcare as an individual’s personal responsibility, or at least as a personal responsibility exercised through voluntary association, as in workplace health insurance. When the debate around gay marriage shifted from a discussion of God, gender, sex, and propriety to a debate over individual rights, tolerance, and the personal freedom of Americans to choose their partners, the struggle for marriage equality became easier.

American voluntarism makes it hard for social-democratic reformers to persuade their fellow citizens to accept the types of ambitious state-run initiatives common in most Western democracies, such as universal healthcare, free preschools, and guaranteed labor rights. Conversely, the spirit of American voluntarism makes it harder for non-Americans to understand our public policies, which are often caricatured as being nakedly Darwinian.

That American society was notably different—exceptional was the term—from other Western societies was a staple for much of 20th-century social science. Researchers have offered up lists of hows and whys, trying to distill the difference. I joined the enterprise when I started researching my 2010 book, Made in America, and the evidence spoke to the centrality of voluntarism in understanding American culture and its so-called exceptionalism.

Observers have for generations described Americans as deeply individualistic. But, as I argued in Made in America, individualism is too simple a description. Certainly, deeply instilled in American culture is the assumption that we are each a “sovereign” individual: the belief that each person is, deep down, a unique character, distinct and separate from everyone else, that ultimately each person determines his or his own fate, and that individuals ought to be self-reliant.

From the perspective of world history, this notion of the sovereign individual is odd. Most cultures at most times treated individuals as organic parts of their family, lineage, and tribe. That is why, for example, collective punishment—you took our goat, so my family will take your cousin’s sheep—is widely accepted around the globe, even today, after centuries of Westernization. An example I like to use in teaching is marriage: In most places, in most times, marriage has been in principle primarily about connecting families and lineages. Parents sensibly married off youths to appropriate partners. My students, many of them only a generation or two from that Old World, instead take it for granted that marriage is about two young, not fully mature individuals freely choosing one another based on their individual emotions—a weird notion, indeed. Individual sovereignty is a broadly Western assumption, and Americans are the most Western of Westerners.

Individualism, however, is a severely incomplete description of the American character, ignoring America’s strong communal dimension. Just as Alexis de Toqueville and other observers wrote in the 19th century of Americans’ individualism, they also described intensive community activity: neighborly assistance like barn raising; joint endeavors like militias and tending of commons; and clubs from sewing circles to lecture societies. In contrast to churches that were outposts of a central ecclesiastical authority such as Roman Catholicism and the established Protestant denominations (for examples, the Church of England and the Lutheran Church of Norway), the dominant American form was a grassroots Protestant church. This was a voluntary association of individuals who found others with common religious yearnings, pooled their resources, and hired a minister.

The many secular versions of this communalism in America—Rotary clubs, blood drives, online Kickstarter-type philanthropy projects, walks against diseases, beach cleanup weekends, you name it—belie the caricature of Americans as selfish individualists. Critically, such associations are ones individuals have voluntarily chosen; they are not tribes, castes, clans, manors, or ethnicities into which people are born and in which they die. Nor are these distinctively American types of associations sponsored or organized by the state.

American voluntarism is the merging of our individualistic and communal strains, the worldview that individuals forge their distinct fates with like-minded people in groups that they have individually, freely chosen to join and are individually free to leave. People attain their personal ends through community, but through voluntary community. And thus they are both sovereign individuals and community citizens.

My favorite expression of this view is a statement from 1905 by Alma A. Rogers, a local writer in Portland, Oregon, who celebrated simultaneously women’s individuation and women’s community activity: “Woman has at last made the fateful discovery that she is an individual, not an adjunct. Therefore, she thrills to the pulse of organization; and lo! The woman’s club is born.” Another revealing expression is the 1960s-era slogan, “America: Love it or Leave It.” It captured the idea that people are not forced to be American, but as long as they choose to be, they are expected to be committed to the voluntary association that is America. The key to the American community, in other words, are the acts of opting in and every day choosing to stay in. That is why collective action through the state is anathema to so many Americans—it seems to usurp individual agency and responsibility, alone or in community.

Over the years, of course, Americans often compromised this voluntarism for practical reasons. Social Security is a paternalistic government mandate that people accepted during a great crisis, although it was cloaked in the language of “insurance” rather than welfare. But for the most part, such policies remain tough sells. Many observers on the left hoped that the Great Recession would trigger social-democratic breakthroughs. But Obamacare is, in historical perspective, a small step in that direction, a complex and limited extension of government subsidies for private health insurance rather than a full-on establishment of a universal entitlement. Some research suggests that Americans have actually moved against government initiatives in the wake of the financial crisis.

Americans will continue to argue about the proper boundary between our individual spheres and the sphere of our government. But, even in these disagreements, there is a common mindset, shared by right and left, that Americans should get to choose the nature of their participation in the nation. Thirty years ago this month, New York Governor Mario Cuomo delivered a speech at the Democratic National Convention in which he tried to replace or moderate that voluntaristic motif with another kind of imagery,

the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings … . We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another …

It was a rhetorically powerful moment, but a losing political strategy. Today, perhaps more than ever, Americans don’t tend to think of the nation as a “family” to which we are “bound,” but rather as a club that we have joined.

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