What’s it about?: Jay Gatsby is a man who falls in love with a woman, Daisy. He cannot have her, so he becomes rich and powerful in an attempt to win her affection. He puts everything into his love for this woman, and the world kills him for it, essentially. The narrator, Nick Carroway, is a friend of Gatsby’s. He watches in disbelief as his friend falls to pieces.
My opinion: Excellent. The Great Gatsby is considered one of the greatest books of all time, and for once, I can see why. I first read the book in high school, in Year 11 Literature. I think it’s safe to say that many were introduced to the next at some point in Year 11 or 12. We studied it in the context of the “roaring twenties” and the blatant corruption and illegal activity that made that era. I took this context in and became obsessed with it. One guy throwing all these awesome parties during Prohibition? What are the chances? Is this what the American Dream was supposed to be? What standards are these people holding themselves to, exactly? Will they get Gatsby on tax evasion like Al Capone? Well, that and numerous themes such as social class, gender, identity and belonging, antisemitism, and others. There was and is so much to unpack, and it’s why The Great Gatsby became one of the few that I actually re-read after graduating.
[Aside: Some other texts I read in high school that didn’t suck: To Kill a Mockingbird, All the Pretty Horses, This Boy’s Life, and anything by Shakespeare. Others, like The Wife of Martin Guerre, are best left forgotten.]
Why re-read? First off, The Great Gatsby is beautifully written. It is a highly quotable text, with many famous lines etched into memory. But for me, this will always stand out:
“If that was true he must have felt he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”
Secondly, the characters and the overall picture it paints. Gatsby, Daisy, Meyer Wolfsheim, and of course Nick Carraway. Wolfsheim is a fascinating element — based on the gangster Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series. This is a real shock to Carraway, who basically took this a given. He knew the World Series was fixed. Gatsby mentions this more or less in passing, but this completely blows Carraway’s mind. He stops, and says, “I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain.” And it was the end of some chain in a lot of ways, but what went on behind the scenes, how the World Series was put together, was simply beyond belief for the narrator.
This is based on real events, and I have no doubt the vast majority of people saw it as Carraway did. I would have too, as I probably do with many things that unfold in today’s world. I’m not sure whether I should be impressed or horrified, but it is what it is.
The beauty of The Great Gatsby is the different ways it can be interpreted. Education and entertainment all in one, what good literature should be. It stays on my shelf with the best of them, and often I find myself pulling it out to revisit this or that passage. That’s why it has stood the test of time.
Lawrence Deveney 