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The ending conclusion is so bizarre to me.
From the article:
> That’s a question to think about as you start to read this thing, whether for the first or fifty-first time. Daisy is this man’s objective, but she’s the wrong fantasy. It was never her he wanted. Not really. It was America. One that’s never existed. Just a movie of it. America.
My reading is the exact opposite. He falls deeply in love as a young man, cannot correctly frame this infatuation with Daisy, and spend his entire life in trying to win her back. The wealth was a means to an end. Rather than being purposeful about his love for her, he goes about it in an almost timeless fashion. Gatzby makes himself visible in the largest way he can, stretching out into the world, without actually directly aiming for her. Hence all the parties, so eventually Daisy must get caught up in his orbit, just by the sheer enormity of his presence. It was _exactly_ her he wanted, and the mansion across the water, the sports cars, were the elaborate mechanisms to get her. Not "america" or whatever. The ambiguity is if she truly loved him, or if Daisy just got caught up by the sheer gravitational pull of it all.
It's happened to be set in the roaring 20s because that's when the book was written, the self-made man was already a trope in american literature, as was the excess of the nouveau riche. It's a book - quite simply - about (mostly) unrequited love, and the length men equate achievement with desirability.
I read it over the weekend and was pleasantly surprised.
The story is thin, the underlying themes are a bit richer, but it is the style that is extraordinary. I have highlighted many, many sentences just for their delightful form, rich descriptiveness and poignant observational value.
Other than that, the place in time and bottled up description of the roaring 20s are other reasons people keep referring to it.
I’ve just read Tender is the Night, and while I didn’t love it like I loved The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald knocks it out of the park with “poignant observational value”.
“Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.”
That was a favourite sentence.
What's funny to me — and I mean this sincerely, not as a troll — almost all the examples of good writing in Gatsby in this thread and the target article seem overwrought to me. If you'd present them to me out of context, I'd think they were examples of comically bad writing.
I'm sort of neutral about The Great Gatsby. It's not my favorite but I think it's become a popular testament to its era. Because that era in many ways is the dawning of our own, it has special relevance.
I'm not native and also am blown away by Fitzgerald writing, reading the great gatsby and tender is the night afterwards. They are rather different books, but I loved the characters in tender is the night a lot more, so my preference would go to this one I guess.
I kind of feel Fitzgerald gets a lot more press than his contemporaries like Dresier, John O' Hara and Sinclair Lewis. How does Gatsby hold up against 'Sister Carrie' or 'An American Trajedy' or 'Main Street' or 'Babbitt'?
I suppose I have picked the wrong time to start reading more of the "serious" stuff on the Internet and offline. This article would have been ok except for the totally random mention of blackface which read like a fulfillment of the current editorial house rules than an organic part. Of course the kicker is the mention of "forty-five" because you haven't written something of substance until you make some sort of oblique reference to him.
"It would have been an age in which self-cultivation construes as a delusion of the American dream. You could build a fortune, then afford to build an identity"
I had always thought the American Dream was rising from a lower class to have a humble house, a few children, a stable Mon-Fri job, and some basic comforts.
Where did the idea that the American Dream is about riches come from?
Note that I'm not saying the American Dream is unique. I just never heard that it somehow was tied to getting rich.
Getting rich has been a part of the American dream since at least the gold rush, the idea of striking out west to make your fortune.
More generally I’d argue that the American dream is that we made a country with greater social mobility than any other. That from any start, through hard work and intelligence you could become either middle class or rich according to your will. That the only thing holding you back would be your ability to capitalize on opportunities.
It is of course, a dream that was either never true or has ended. It is demonstrably false that the US has greater social mobility than many of our contemporary first world countries. While there is still opportunity here, and social mobility is far from impossible, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor is probably closer to the truth of modern America than the American dream of a fully socially mobile society.
What are the countries with higher mobility. Including those for the mobility of immigrants. Just wondering if you still have some sources around to research.
>fully socially mobile society.
Such a thing has never existed and never will. There's not much space at the top.
>demonstrably false
Then demonstrate it. And don't use spurious derived measures like some abstract social mobility index, argue an actual case. The US is still the place where you move to if you want to truly make it big in life, even if you've got lottery odds of success. I say this as a resident of a fairly well off European country.
Strange coincidence - I just read it for the first time, and I’m pushing 50. I thought it was incredible. So much packed into so few words.
'Cause people often acting like Gatsby: live in a mirage, unrealistic dreams, high expectations, not always (so) romantic as described in the book. So there are natural reasons to be sympathetic.
Have doubts if you can understand it all in high school, but for 20-30+ people it's great book and shows perfectly what happened if you are obsessed with your dreams.
Can we agree it's not-the-best but has a good moral message about the danger of living in an illusionary bubble?
The book’s message about fantasy is much richer than you’re giving it credit for.
Gatsby isn’t simply a wild dreamer, he has a very specific dream, a dream that is wrapped up in the individualistic American dream and its tension with class. He’s also not living in an illusion, it’s repeatedly noted that he’s chasing the past (which he had with Daisy), but fatally cannot catch it because he needs something he had to have owned before he was even born. Nobility.
Gatsby is an enormously capable and wonderful person. He is both ridiculously resourceful, and interpersonally treasured. He falls in love with a rich young woman, Daisy, who herself is interpersonally treasured but also whose wealth is an inevitable draw on the dirt poor Gatsby.
Against all odds, Gatsby rises through American life to be possibly even richer than Tom Buchanan, the old-money rich man Daisy marries. Despite Gatsby’s accomplishments and abilities, he is still unable to wrest back Daisy from her old money life, highlighting the distance between them that was always class-based and foundational, a distance that would had wrecked their relationship even if Gatsby had never gone to war and left Daisy. The old-money Daisy and Tom “were careless people”, notes Nick the narrator. Gatsby’s fatal flaw was how much he cared about and believed in the American Dream and those who supposedly occupied it. He cared and did everything right, but they didn’t care that he did, because the American Dream means nothing to the upper-class. Climb it, against all odds, and they’ll still sneer, or in Daisy’s case be too weak to abandon the security of class.
I don’t think you should read The Great Gatsby for it’s moral message about living in an illusion. It’s a story about the American Dream and it’s conflict with class.
Having written that out stream of consciousness style, I’ve gone to check the Wikipedia and under Analysis the top two subheadings are “The American Dream” and “Class Permanence” so I think I have picked up what Fitzgerald was putting down, more or less.
I initially loved The Great Gatsby because Fitzgerald writes beautiful sentences, and because Gatsby had a Randian hero quality to him. But after a while the political and gender commentary has become equally as valued.
Somewhat related: the staff at NPR's Planet Money recently released a 4.5-hour reading of the Great Gatsby.
BBC's In Our Time (pretty good podcast) also did an episode on The Great Gatsby: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r4tq
I didn't like it. I don't get what is so good about its style. The prose is too purple and it meanders a lot. Even for its time the style feels choppy.
Purple? How is prose purple? Genuinely curious if this is an alternate usage for the word or a typo.
There's a meandering article here but not much of a thesis.
Even when the author addresses the title of the article itself ("So again: Why this book—for ninety-six years, over and over?") he goes back to meandering.
It seems like the author is trying to say something between "we read it because it's like watching celebrity drama and awful people are fun to watch" or "we read it because it's the American Dream" or "something along those lines, but again, it meanders so badly between unrelated (probably true, or at least opinion) statement to other (probably true, or at least opinion) statement where it ultimately ends up going nowhere.
The thesis is that we read the book because it’s about performativity, and Americans have a different relationship with performativity than Europeans do. Every paragraph in the article from “so again” onwards is about performativity.
An example of performativity, from the book but not mentioned in the article—Gatsby’s house has bookshelves filled with books, presumably never read, only there for decoration. Gatsby is performing the part of being rich. Since Americans do not have nobility, we take our performance cues (how to act upper class) by imitating Europeans. It’s a hundred years later and we still imitate Europeans and ape European culture when we want to pretend to be rich and upper-class.
This article is written in what's becoming a new modern 'style' in which the author doesn't say much of anything at all, but makes references, references, and allusions to modern shibboleths and meta-idioms.
This is the high brow version of a 4chan post - its only purpose is to show how clever the author is, and to make the reader feel clever for being in on it.
Don't disagree, yet last paragraph seems to claim a thesis:
>Daisy is this man’s objective, but she’s the wrong fantasy. It was never her he wanted. Not really. It was America.
Trouble is, the reviewer is dead wrong on Gatsby's psychology. Gatsby, like the protagonist of Tender, and various characters from his short stories, is a working-out of the central tragedy of Fitzgerald's own life, his failure to find a soul-mate. This is hinted at in Hemingway's Moveable Feast, and laid out fairly plainly in some of his letters.
Gatsby in particular fails because he fixes his desire on an unworthy object, who does not return his love. With mirror symmetry, Gatsby himself is unworthy of the love of a decent woman, being a grifter. The dramatic resolution can only be death for Gatsby.
So I don't remember anything of the book itself, but I do remember my opinion of it when we read it back in highschool being very similar to your "meandering and going nowhere". Maybe the article's author is such a fan because they see themselves in the book's writing style.
It can be hard to appreciate The Great Gatsby if, like many Americans, you were forced to read it in high school. The book is stained with your own memories of high school.
Even if you like reading, the experience of being forced to read some particular book can make it feel like the book itself has wronged you.
I love reading. I didn't read it until my early 30s, other than the last lines, there's nothing memorable at all about it, and honestly they're so out of character of the rest of the book, they feel like they were taken from something else. I kept waiting for it to get good. I'm still waiting.
I agree, in the Netherlands we were forced to read about 20 Dutch and 10 English books in "high school" (around age 16-17). I was an avid reader. I lost it for quite some years after that.
I did learn some things and some books were memorable but I think I actually enjoyed about 2-3 books of that time.
I had to read it in high school and, while I didn't really feel forced, I can't say I liked it very much.
It's clearly well written, but I just couldn't bring myself to give a damn about any single character throughout.
My high school had it as required reading (over summer vacation). I was never a big reader to begin with so this book along with others (Jude the Obscure, A Separate Peace) have always been in a bad light for me in my mind (I guess having a book that I would tested and grilled over first thing in the school year does that). However, as an adult I found reading books such as IT, Silence of the Lambs and The Grapes of Wrath really entertaining. When I have some time I think I'll give this classic another try.
My high school assigned it. Thinking back now, I'm sure this was a mistake: most of the themes Gatsby deals with are way ahead of high-schoolers and just won't resonate with anyone under thirty.
I loved reading, but hated every book I had to read in high school. Just couldn't relate to them. Only later did I realize most of them were pretty good and meaningful.
I honestly think it's a terrible book that happened to retain its popularity because it got shoved in as a classic that you need to read.
There are works that I genuinely enjoy, like Anthem by Ayn Rand, even though it's moralistic propaganda.
I supposed I could reread the work again to see how I feel about it, but there are million of other works I could read.
After not reading for a few years I felt both within and without.
Coincidentally, this novel was recently discussed on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r4tq
Hah, much as the host occasionally annoys me with his interrupts, I can't recommend this podcast enough!
Honestly, my only real complaint is the audio levels of the various guests. It seems like they're not normalized(?) enough so the audio goes from loud to very quiet.
But I can definitely recommend going through the backlog of this podcast. Great stuff.
Apparently we read it because of "forty-five" and capitalism as emotion. For certain definitions of "we," of "America."
This performance of an analysis strikes me as trying to be too meta-cute to take seriously. Maybe the author was practicing writing from the viewpoint of Holden Caulfield.
This is the second reference to The Catcher in the Rye I see in this thread... If Great Gatsby is anything like that book, I don't want it any closer to me than orbital distances.
I've never read it, it wasn't part of school (Yes, I'm in the U.S.), and I'm not sure anyone I know has read it (at last we've never discussed it).
This is a really funny article for me to see, because I am currently sitting in high school, ignoring my teacher who is teaching this book. Great timing.
English is fundamentally a culture class. The goal is to instill certain values through required literature. From what I recall the Great Gatsby is mainly about the ills of great wealth and gilded age capitalism.
If you talk about the themes of the book in a supportive way you're certain to get better grades. Don't just recap what you've read, endorse what they are trying to teach you and you'll be a much more successful English student.
Because it's a crappy version of the count of monte cristo.
Aren't you taking a stretch here? Plotwise, both protagonists have different reasons to attain their goals. And besides the plot, don't they handle different topics?
I don't think we'll ever see the Count of Monte Cristo assigned in US high schools. It's too long.
"The tragedy here is the death of the heart, capitalism as an emotion."
The piece seems to equate capitalism with materialism. But the former is an economic system; the latter a universal human flaw.
Winning material wealth doesn't win love or happiness. Living in a country with a few socialist policies doesn't magically make you immune from falling into that trap.
> Materialism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Materialism
How is materialism a universal human flaw? From context I would assume you mean greed.
>The piece seems to equate capitalism with materialism.
You assume the piece seeks to make an argument, or even a statement, as opposed to making vague references to popular/twitter sentiment.
Probably because English teachers have all read it and can teach it if they need to switch into teaching that class.
It’s a trash book but material to teach books takes a lot of time and effort to conjure up and honestly not worth it unless there’s a clearly better successor to replace the book with.