The Great Gatsby

A deserved classic that bears repeated reading. An excoriating portrayal of how wealth affects personal relationships, creating emotional poverty. As relevant today as when it was written (and set) in the 1920s jazz age. A genuine contender for the Great American Novel.

Scott Fitzgerald is not a literary writer. He's the king of what I call faux-literature: fill your bowl with plot, add a dash of panache, a cup of nostalgia, three whiffs of yearning, and a drop of insight, and ice it with some fruity prose. Bang, you're done.

But people love him. And who am I to stop the people from having their fun? Like many young people, I adored Gatsby on first reading it during my 17th year. Its exquisite art deco finishing, its sublime sense of pathos, its richness without being threatening like all those disturbing Modernists... Of course, with each passing year, my appreciation of its values lessens, but my appreciation of that feeling remains strong. And perhaps that's the real secret of Gatsby? Like so many show more folk tales, we can never disassociate the book from the way it drew out our youthful sense of envy, of pain, of ambition, and ultimately of loss. This novel lives within me, and within so many, even though it no longer forms a conscious part of how I view the world. (And say what you will about him; few people have written a closing paragraph as perfect as what Fitzgerald does here.)

A towering piece of 20th century American fiction, nevertheless. show less

Necesité 3 intentos para terminar El gran Gatsby.
Tal vez porque conocía la historia por las películas, nunca leí más allá de un par de páginas. Hoy lo hice, estoy muy feliz por ello. Puede resumir sentimientos complejos de la vida real como nadie.

El mensaje también es conmovedor.

Pobrecito Gatsby, creías en el sueño americano, creías en el amor, creías en todas las historias románticas y en las historias románticas, creías que podías pretender ascender. Que tu dinero te daría clase.
Pero todo lo que necesitaba era una confrontación con Tom y tu castillo de naipes, tu imagen de cristal se hizo mil pedazos.
Daisy ni siquiera estuvo nunca en tu mismo universo. Ella ES dinero, tu simplemente lo tienes temporalmente.
Moriste show more solo, olvidado, descartado. Al mundo nunca le importaste realmente.

El libro golpea duro.
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The Great Gatsby is an iconic book. You can’t just write a review of it as if it weren’t. A lot has been said about it. If you are going to add something, say something different, or something personal, or both! I’ll try to do that.

But I’ll start with something pretty standard — the American Dream angle. But I’ll work that into something that may be a little different.

Gatsby, the character, is entwined with the idea of “the American dream.” Gatsby is wealthy. We don’t know how he got there, and, given the mystery about it, the rumors about him, the disinformation he seems to encourage or even spread, and especially given his close relationship with Meyer Wolfsheim, there’s reason to think his wealth may be tainted show more with ill-gotten gains.

This is the Roaring Twenties, and there’s a flimsy, paper-doll version of the American Dream in currency. In that setting, the story, among other things, explores the severing of the dream from its substance — becoming wealthy by doing great things replaced by becoming wealthy, period. Grift, crime, corruption, pretense, . . . take the place of achievement of great and good things.

Of course, Fitzgerald is writing this in the twenties himself, without the benefit of hindsight into the crash and depression that follows. But I think he does see the one-dimensionality of wealth. Gatsby is a front — his name isn’t even real. And the parties and the grandeur of his lifestyle are as grounded as movie set shrubbery.

And that grandeur, and Gatsby’s wealth itself, are tied to Gatsby’s own dream — his reuniting with Daisy, who he met when he was poor and unaccomplished. But his wealth makes him worthy of Daisy, now inconveniently married to Tom Buchanan, and sighted as a green light on a dock in the distance across the bay from Gatsby’s own dock. Gatsby’s Rosebud.

It turns out that that particular dream might have been better kept a dream — an inspiration, or even a wistful romanticism. As a reality, it’s an outright mess for all involved.

Just as the Roaring Twenties became the Great Depression, dreams and reality have their way of sorting themselves out.

Take another angle on the story. Nick Carraway, it has been said, is an odd choice to narrate the story. He’s almost an observer. He knows everyone involved, or comes to know them. But his own actions are relatively peripheral, facilitating and telling the story but not driving it.

Suppose it were told from another point of view. The obvious choices would be Gatsby himself, in which case the story might be a tragedy. Or Daisy — it would be fun to know what actually goes on in her mind after Gatsby confronts Tom with his determination to take Daisy from him. What are her thoughts of Gatsby at that point and forward? Or, what is Daisy’s reaction to Myrtle Wilson’s death?

Just as interesting maybe is to imagine the story told from Myrtle or George Wilson’s perspective. Almost a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead version of the story. The Wilsons are not wealthy, not happy either. They live under the eye of Dr. Eckleburg between East and West Egg, between the Buchanans and Gatsby, like a crossroads for their lives. As it is, Fitzgerald almost treats them as collateral damage to the drama of the main protagonists/antagonists.

And what do we make of Nick himself? Just for fun, contrast Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway with Somerset Maugham’s Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge. The two novels were written about 20 years apart, but both address post-WWI America, the lead into the Roaring Twenties. Both Nick and Larry are figuring out their lives in the aftermath of their service during the war.

Larry’s experiences during the war lead him to philosophical questions about life and how to lead a worthy life. By contrast, during the war, Nick “enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.” Nick moves to New York to get into the bond business. Larry declines a presumed position in an investment firm to do something he considers more important and more compelling — the substance, not the dream.

Okay, I think that’s enough. Good novels change the way you think about life. show less

Recently, I had the experience of being told by a group of five or six people how "bored" they all were by "The Great Gatsby." I'm sorry they feel that way, but I can't agree. "Gatsby" holds a special place in my heart, and a strange nostalgic memory of a certain time in my middle adolescence - discovering my mother's old, yellowed college paperback, with the appropriately brown-and-yellow-hued cover illustration, and taking it back with me to be read, stealthily, in the corner of my spacious bathroom.

I spent a lot of time in the bathroom, then. In the cold winter months, my bedroom and bath - the farthest rooms in the house - were always the hardest to heat, and the warmest place in my small, teenage refuge was just by the bathtub, show more next to the heater set in the wall near the floor. Whichever year it was - was I 15? 16? - I spent a lot of afternoons there, lulled by the warmth and the calm, sea green tiled floors. I read "The Scarlet Letter" there, and tried to read "Moby Dick"; I plowed through Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man," and finally learned that while I had no love for "Huckleberry Finn," there was a lot of Twain I thought was really good. Most of all, I remember "Gatsby," devoured quickly in just two or three reading sessions, and for once I don't recall my mother ever insisting I "come out and rejoin the world."

It's interesting coming back to "Gatsby" after all this time. I've lived a lot since those days of whenever-teen, and I come back to "Gatsby" as someone who has at least *thought* herself in love, and definitely someone who has been caught up, unhealthily and unavoidably, in an attraction to someone I couldn't have. It's appropriate that I re-experience the book just as I've made a clean break of that relationship, and while there weren't any big scenes or tragic consequences, it all makes those feelings Fitzgerald writes about - loss, betrayal, the realization that you won't be the one "chosen" - much more personal. And of course, what "Gatsby" proves is that we all have those feelings. We all lie to each other; we all cheat; we all play mercilessly with each others' hearts. It's true. It's not the whole picture of human relationship, but that much is true. And we always hurt others as much, if not more than we hurt ourselves.

When I was a teenager, Jay Gatsby was a mysterious character, a figure both tragic and a bit sexy - the Beast of the famous fairy tale, waiting for Beauty to break his enchantment. I grieved for him but I didn't understand how much he had sown his own destruction. He built himself up, and in almost one fell movement, he knocked himself down. Now I see him in less mythic and far more familiar terms. Gatsby is anyone who knows they shouldn't say something, but says it anyway. Gatsby is anyone who can't stop themselves manipulating for their own advantage. Gatsby is anyone who plows ahead without stopping to think.

More specifically, Gatsby is what Americans train themselves to be. He is the exact inverse of the mythical American, raising him or herself up above meager roots to triumph supreme. He's the guy who did all that, who won't be told no, who thinks himself invincible and is never happy with his lot. And the amazing part of Fitzgerald's writing is that he manages to make Gatsby sympathetic - in fact, more than that, he makes him someone you can *empathize* with. Gatsby, in the end, is everyone - or at least, anyone likely to read his story.

I still don't understand how anyone could be bored by "The Great Gatsby." It's a beautiful and tragic novel, so simple yet so rich. It doesn't take long to read, and it's not exactly dense, old-fashioned prose. Compared to most classic literature it's an absolute breeze. But never mind. I love it, just as I loved all those afternoons ago - huddled in my bathroom, turning the dog-eared pages of an old paperback, waiting for the winter to end. show less

The story of Jay Gatsby's rise, who pursues unrequited love by making himself a millionaire through bootlegging, and eventual downfall is a chronicle of the Jazz Age and an enduring indictment of the myth of the American Dream.

I have been slowly and fitfully working my way through the classic novels I last read in high school and college, in order to enjoy them without a term paper or final exam hanging over my head. In rereading The Great Gatsby, I was less concerned with the symbolic meaning of the gigantic eyes of T. J. Ecklesburg and more struck by the alien landscape of the ash field those eyes looked down upon. I was less worried about what the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock meant exactly and just knocked down by the show more image of romantic futility painted by Gatsby waving his arms at that dock. In other words, I was more open to the experience of the novel as a great story, rather than great literature. I feel like Daisy and Tom, with their vapid shallowness and complete lack of compassion for other people, are as relevant representations of our culture today as they were of Fitzgerald’s then. The American dream is still a powerful myth that has not yet been debunked, and Gatsby could have been as easily victimized by it in the early 21st century as he was in the premiere age of the nouveau riche. The mark of a true classic is not that it is still being taught in college classrooms, but that it is still a recognizable and moving story decades after it was written.

Fitzgerald didn’t like the title. Judging by his preferences – Trimalchio in West Egg; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Gold-Hatted Gatsby; and The High-Bouncing Lover – it was probably best that someone else had chosen the title for him. show less

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the decrepit side of the American Dream, which truly erupted during the 1920s.
With a darkness stirring inside Gatsby, a feeling of loneliness takes hold, and his longing for an old flame sparks into reality. Readers come to learn that life as a glamourous host is not all it’s cracked up to be; his heart, head, and identity is jumbled beyond recognition; the person he could have married is seemingly unattainable; the green light he is so set on is merely a feebly lit lantern. All in all, superficiality reigns supreme in the mansion Gatsby calls his “home”.
The snazzy millionaire changed everything about himself, from his name to the uneducated dialect of his youth. While show more watching his story unfold, one uncovers the languished lifestyle of the rich and infamous. Looking for a taste of champagne with a dash of insanity? Pick up this book and join the party, old sport. show less