The Great Gatsby

Perhaps more than any other book I have ever read, this marvellous novel leads up to its final sentence. There are lots of novels with memorable or poignant final sentences, but the whole crux of "The Great Gatsby resides in the final four paragraphs, and, in particular, in the closing sentence, "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

At the simplest level this is a love story. Gatsby as a young and impoverished man meets, and falls deeply in love with, Daisy Fay, but is posted to Europe as America becomes involved in the First World War. Now, in 1922 Gatsby is immensely wealthy, and buys a huge mansion in New Jersey just across the sound from the house where Daisy now lives with her husband show more Tom Buchanan. Nick Carraway, the beautifully understated narrator of the novel first encounters Gatsby staring out across the sound. What Nick doesn't realise is that Gatsby is transfixed by the view, staring at a bright green light at the end of the Buchanans' jetty, which he sees as a token of his unfading love for Daisy.

Throughout the summer Gatsby holds a series of wild parties to which everyone in the neighbourhood seems to come. Gatsby takes little part in these revelries, and only later do we discover that he doesn't like parties at all, and only hosted them in the vague hope that Daisy might eventually chance to come along to one of them. The parties are certainly uproarious affairs, and it comes as a bit of a shock to remember that they were happening against the backdrop of America's misplaced experiment with Prohibition. Champagne and spirits flow with great abandon.

Throughout the novel Gatsby remains an enigma - no-one seems to know who he is, or where he came from. Conflicting speculations abound, with some characters asserting, vehemently, that he is a German spy while others aver, equally rigorously, that he belongs to one of Europe's older royal houses. Gatsby himself is scarcely to be believed, telling Nick Carraway at different times that he had inherited his money from an immensely wealthy family, only later to describe how he had had to struggle when he started in business because he lacked any capital or inheritance. He quickly adapts his story, but already the cracks are there for doubters to probe.

Carraway goes through a range of emotion reactions towards Gatsby, at different times admiring him, liking him despising him, though in the end admiration shines through. "Gatsby turned out all right in the end".

The other characters are finely drawn, too. Tom Buchanan is simply odious: a racist, arrogant thug who is shielded from the realities of life by his huge wealth. Daisy, Buchanan's wife and the great obsessive love of Gatsby's life isn't faultless, either. She is a slightly ephemeral character, and we see more of her through Gatsby's recollections or Jordan Baker's tales of their shared youth than we really learn from our encounters with the woman herself. On balance she and Tom are well suited to each other: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . ."

Gatsby has clearly had some dubious connections (or "gonnegtions" as Meyer Wolfsheim, one of his cronies would say). Indeed, there is a chilling paradoxical footnote for later readers. Wolfsheim, the stereotypical rendition of a Jewish gangster, makes a big point about the shell company he uses to launder the proceeds of his villainy. What now seems bizarre to us is that he calls this company the "Swastika Holding Company". Of course, the novel was published in 1925 and set in 1922 and that symbol had not yet acquired its later chilling associations. It is merely fortuitous that a Jewish character should choose to adopt it.

All of this makes the book sound somewhat chaotic. Not a bit of it. The novel flows with great pace, and Firtzgerald's prose has an almost hypnotic effect. Is it The Great American Novel? I don't know. However, I do know that it is A Great American Novel, and that's enough for me. show less

Great novel with a little bit of everything going on… the difference between men driven from the heart and men driven from the head, the emptiness of fair weather friends, the hidden motivations that shape men’s decisions, and the collateral damage of volatile people, to name a few. The author chooses to land primarily on the mistake we often make of living in the past, chasing dreams that have already passed us by. All told, the author did a lot with this little novel, and he did it well.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THE GREAT GATSBY: THE ALPHABETISED CENTENNIAL EDITION?
I could (should?) save myself a bunch of time and just point you to The Publisher's Explanation of the book and its background. Seriously, skip most of what I write here and just read it.

But because I feel compelled to say something about this unique offering, I'm going to plow on.

Inspired by Concrete Poetry (which is something I don't think I'd heard of until I read the above from Fahrenheit Press) and the centennial of The Great Gatsby, Chris McVeigh has taken the classic, and as you should assume from the subtitle, alphabetized it.

As McVeigh writes in the introduction:

...this alphabetised edition of The show more Great Gatsby is not a puzzle to be solved, or a parody to provoke. It is rather, a re-seeing of language in the raw - a confrontation with the building blocks of a story we think we know.

Removed from their narrative scaffolding, Gatsby’s words fall into new patterns, unexpected rhythms, and visual clusters. “Daisy” “dream” and “death” no longer emerge from plot, but jostle for position in a flattened, democratic field. The result is a text not about the American Dream, but made of it—its’ language laid bare, its’ seductions and emptiness exposed with surgical neutrality.

WHAT WOULD T.G. ECKLEBERG HAVE TO SAY?
Who knows, but those giant eyes of his would probably enjoy taking this in.

You really don't even have to read the words, you can just open any page and take in the visual impact, the shapes that emerge from just bare words—limited punctuation (mostly apostrophes), no paragraphs, just a word-space-word-space-word sequence for 197 pages.

It's striking, mesmerizing, and can even evoke an emotional response somehow.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT THE GREAT GATSBY: ALPHABETISED CENTENNIAL EDITION?
I honestly don't know. But I can say I've thought about it a lot since getting it.

McVeigh asks:

Is story found only in sequence? Can meaning survive fragmentation? Might new meanings emerge—accidental, ambient, and poetic—from the ruins of arrangement?

At this moment, my answers are: Yes. Possibly? (pronounced with a heavy question mark) Yes, just don't ask me what any of them are.

I've picked this up and read through a few pages several times in the week or so since I got this, and each time I start to think I'm getting something. Like Dirk Gentley said, I felt like I could "grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all." But I've fallen short each time, but I'm going to keep trying.

But this is not a book for everyone, I should stress. For example, I showed this to my wife, who I thought might appreciate the idea. She looked through it and gave me one of those looks and asked, "You spent money on this?"

Yes, I did. Happily so—and am still glad I did. Not just for the novelty (which probably drove the purchase, to be frank), but because it's giving me the opportunity to ask those questions I started this section with. This might not be much of a review, but I think it's the heartiest endorsement I could give of the project.

I spent money on this, you should consider doing the same. show less

Sometimes I wonder why we have teenagers read classics, which is a funny thing for me to wonder because I am, 99% of the time, wholeheartedly in favor of having everybody of every age read classics. I think it's important to shape people's minds around good, complex writing. Without any evidence to support this idea, I think it helps people become better thinkers and to be more discerning in their analysis of culture and life in general, and helps them see their lives as part of a larger story. It's a way of traveling without spending a ton of cash or waiting for the invention of a time machine.

But sometimes, I wonder if it's counter-productive to introduce these books too early.

When I read The Great Gatsby in high school, I didn't see show more the appeal at all. I thought it was kind of pitiful that this guy was pining after this vacuous woman who lived across the bay, but that's all I really caught from the book. The characters were old (ancient...like, thirty), and I just couldn't relate to them at all.

Twenty-odd years later, my read on this book is much different. I found it a beautifully written, very depressing story.

It's amazing to think that Fitzgerald was a contemporary of James Joyce and that he read Ulysses while he was writing The Great Gatsby because the styles are so different. Joyce and Fitzgerald do similar things with the intersection of reality and imagination, and in both books there are no clear good guys, but where Joyce gives the reader every single little thing that crosses his characters' minds and leaves us to psychoanalyze them, Fitzgerald gives us a narrator who admittedly gives us only a few months' slice of his own limited perspective---and then leaves us to psychoanalyze both the narrator and all of the other characters.

This time around, I read parts of Kathleen Parkinson's critical study of the novel (confusingly also titled The Great Gatsby) to aid in a deeper reading of the book. Dovetailing on an idea of hers about the interplay between the imagination and reality, I find myself fixated on the idea that the American Dream is fueled by people constantly striving for what they see in their imaginations rather than being content with what they have in their real lives.

There is a scene towards the end of the book where Carraway looks out over Long Island and imagines it the way Dutch settlers might have seen it, both for what it was and for what it represented to them. Since moving to New England, I ask myself often, when the people we now know as Pilgrims figured out that they had accidentally landed far north of Virginia, which is where they'd intended to go, why didn't they continue on south? After they spent their first devastating winter on the Massachusetts coast, why didn't they say, "Nah. This isn't what I'm looking for," and try to find a more hospitable climate with fields that weren't filled with rocks?

After reading Gatsby again, I wonder if what kept the settlers in Massachusetts was the fact that the vision they had for what could be was more real to them than the reality of disease, freezing temperatures, and starvation, just as Gatsby's imagined possible life with Daisy is more real to him than any of the material things he's amassed.

Of course not everyone stayed in New England. While many stayed to reshape the landscape into what they envisioned, many others---when the vision they had refused to mesh with reality---headed west into the interior of the continent.

A line of Nick's that addresses this westward expansion struck me, too: "perhaps we [those who'd grown up in the West] possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."

I wonder if, once the descendants of the European settlers moved west, the dream changed to such an extent that they couldn't go home to the East again any more than they could feel at home in Europe. This relates to another something I've been wondering---why even though I can consciously recognize all manner of negatives with living in the West, I can't seem to feel at home living in the East. Of course, I'm not great at feeling at home anywhere. I'm always imagining a different perspective, a different culture, a different view from my window that I'd have somewhere else. Is this persistent discomfort a failure of my imagination (or my accepting reality), or is it just the way that the American Dream has manifested itself in me?

These are all things I didn't have the perspective to think about when I was fifteen years old, and it left me feeling so cold about Fitzgerald, I took more than 20 years to come back to the book. But I did come back to it. So maybe it wasn't counter-productive to assign it to me in high school after all. show less

I've decided to amend my review and rating. With much thought I've decided that my dislike of the story only stemmed from my intense dislike of Daisy and Tom Buchanan. A good writer can write characters so well that you genuinely hate every single thing about them. My mom said once, when I was complaining about a character in a TV show, that is how you know the acting is good. When you genuinely hate everything about a character. The character, not the actor or the script, the character. I hated everything about those two people. I hated their selfishness and stupidity and vapidness. I hated them. But wasn't that the point? To hate these people and what the stood for? That's how you know the writing was good. It was also a very quick, show more yet intricate story. And, while it made me angry, I have never been able to stop thinking about it. show less

I have this thing for short novels, where everything's written in impossibly beautiful language, that have bittersweet endings.

It is all because of this book.

I was all prepared to hate it, and then it came on to me, with its voices full of money, and can't change the past, and shirts - oh god the shirts - and then... that orgiastic light...

There is nothing I can criticise about this book. To me, this book is what all other books should aspire to be. I think it's interesting that this book, which should have nothing to do with me, an then-sixteen, female, Scot, has everything to do with me, and everything to do with influencing my tastes in literature. Until this point, I had no idea it could be THAT good.

Everything I studied at school I show more was less than fussed about then BAM. This and Hamlet both in one year. Clearly they messed up (or clearly I have a thing for tortured main characters who meet a grisly end, you pick). show less

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I have never read The Great Gatsby before now and somehow managed to not watch either movie about this book. Reading this book and having it end the way that it does, I just want to watch the Leonardo DiCaprio version since the gifs alone has me feel like this version captures the book quite well.

This book takes place during the Jazz Age, just before World War II erupts. Narrated by Nick Carraway, we have him tell the tale of Jay Gatsby and his unending love for Daisy.

Nick's character is there as a reader stand-in. We get to read about his thoughts about some of the people in the book here and there, but often he is merely re-telling a story to us show more that seems as if he has told it to himself repeatedly over and over again.

What I thought was well done is that we have Nick introduce us to Tom and Daisy Buchanan as well as to their friend Jordan Baker before we meet the mysterious Jay Gatsby. The three of them (Tom, Daisy, and Jordan) seem to be the very best epitome of the Jazz Age. Three people who don't seem to have a care in the world. Who look to their own pleasures first, and people second.

It's not surprising to find that Tom is backwards in his thinking (he goes in on the darker races rising up to crush the whites) and we quickly find out that he is not the husband that Daisy wishes him to be.

Daisy from our first glimpses of him seems shrewd and lost. She apparently knows what Tom is about when he is not with her. And it kills Daisy time and time again that no matter what she does, her husband is out there on one of his little "sprees."

Daisy seems to be everything that is golden and right though readers and Nick quickly get to see how shallow inside and out she is.

When we finally have Nick meet Gatsby you can read his disapproval and fascination of this man throughout the entire book. Eventually you realize that Nick in his own way though pitied Gatsby and wanted to protect him, because Nick saw way before Gatsby that his dream of Daisy and the life they should have had together, was not going to ever come.

When Jay comes upon Daisy the first time, you just feel for him. He is awkward and you know that he wants everything to happen as he has pictured it, probably a million times at that point.

What to do when you find out that everything that Gatsby has become, bought, made, was all for Daisy. The one woman that he feels understands him and has loved him, even though she has been married five years at this point to Tom. I could feel Nick's impatience and also love for Gatsby at times. Gatsby is quite childlike, when talking of Daisy, his belief that she could not have loved Tom ever, that she was forced because of Gatsby's circumstances to marry Tom.

But Gatsby's blindness to Daisy's failings is ultimately his undoing.

And in the end Nick is right, you can't repeat the past.

I thought that the writing was fantastic. From beginning to end. This book flows together so nicely you often wonder how you were able to get from one chapter to another since it feels so seamless.

The setting of New York, with Gatsby's home, Daisy's, home, and all of the other places in the book mentioned feels so real. The dock where the green light from Daisy's home is and where Gatsby looked to frequently for her, felt like a place I could trace with my own steps if one day I wanted to.

The parties, the drinking, the laughing, the music, the people. The way that Fitzgerald writes it, you might as well have been standing alongside Nick while he was a guest too.

What makes a great book to me is that you become so invested in the characters you want a different ending than the one you are provided. And so at the end, I wish for a different ending for Jay Gatsby than the one he got.

As one characters says to Nick in the end, "the poor son of a bitch." show less