To believe in progress, as Tocqueville conceives of it, is to believe in choice: American optimism is rooted in American confidence in individual decision making. It’s a sentiment that is echoed at the end of The Great Gatsby, a great American novel that is also one of the great novels of choosing:

[Gatsby] had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .

Someday, then, we will choose differently. And it will, we believe, make all the difference. So it’s no surprise to see thirteen million Americans eager to watch LeBron James choose a basketball team in a television special called “The Decision,” or similar numbers of people willing to watch The Bachelor, in which a man systematically (some would say relentlessly) chooses a marriage partner from a pool of twenty-five contestants. It’s no surprise that a series of American young adult books built around multiple story lines would be called Choose Your Own Adventure (rather than say, Endless Stories) or that more than 250 million of them would be in print by the late 1990s. It’s no surprise that one of the hymns most closely associated with the crusades of the Reverend Billy Graham (“America’s pastor”) would be “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus.” We’re more interested in stories about consequences that come from choosing than in stories about chance, or mere survival. Jaws wouldn’t be Jaws without the mayor’s foolish decision to keep the beaches of Amity Island open, or Quint’s maniacal choice to destroy his boat’s engine in the film’s closing moments. (The movie is at least as much about bad decision making as it is about a giant fish.) In The Godfather, Michael’s fall into crime is conspicuously the result of a choice: He is given another option, another life, and he turns away. Luke Skywalker, dangling from a broken railing, decides to refuse Darth Vader’s proffered hand. “It could have been otherwise,” each film seems to say, “but for this choice.” And if choice is what we want from screenplays, it’s also what we want in the dramas of our own lives: We want to choose, and to be seen choosing. We want it our way, to paraphrase Burger King, and we want others to know that we actually got it our way, to paraphrase Paul Anka (and Frank Sinatra).