The
Great Gatsby
By
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This
was not the book I thought it would be. At first, I thought it rather boring,
with its description of the opulence of the parties. Then it got interesting
when Gatsby finally appeared and you thought it was a love story. Then, I
thought it was less about love and more about Gatsby obsessing about someone
who was out of his reach. It was not a simple book and I have still not
decided.
Illustrative
of how World War I changed how people thought and felt, the narrator, Carraway,
says of returning home after the war, “Instead of being the warm center of the
world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe…”
The
narrator’s shifting perceptions of Gatsby take us through the highs and lows of
this book. He is not a one sided character, all good or all bad. As with life,
it is in large part about perception. He is a self-made man who thinks that the
end justifies the means and that he can get what he wants with money. Sound
familiar?
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried
incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
But
no, no, you can’t, and the fact that he can’t or won’t see or accept that
simple immutable fact tells you something about him. He is fooling himself. He wants something so
much that he is willing to lie to himself. Either that or he’s just plain
crazy. Crazy in love? Perhaps, perhaps.
As
I said, Carraway goes back and forth, based on events, thinking Gatsby a great
guy or a jerk, by measures. His perception of Jordan, the girl he dates a bit,
changes, as well as the husband Tom. Oddly enough, Carraway’s perception of
Daisy, Tom’s wife, never changes. She is unscathed, though he comes to almost
hate Tom.
It’s
a short enough book, under two hundred pages, but I felt like I’d really been
on a journey with this story. I hadn’t seen the movie and didn’t know a lot
about it so I was surprised at every turn. I never saw the car accident coming
or, honestly, what happened to Gatsby.
I highly recommend it for the aspiring writer. I learned so much from the
most deceptively simple sentence, “As I
tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi feeling its way along the dark road toward
the house.” "I heard my taxi feeling its
way along the lane in the dark." Wait, what? Yeah, that is a beautiful
sentence! The fact that the taxi is “feeling its way” is not
possible and yet you know exactly what
he meant, how a car moves slowly along a country lane so that the driver can
see within the limits of the headlights. Then, the choice of “my taxi” instead
of “the taxi” gives it a totally different feel than if he had chosen the other
word. I was mightily impressed.
“Literary
miracles are the work of writers who come closer than other writers to
expressing what is in their minds through innate genius augmented by control,
technique, craft.” Matthew J. Bruccoli, The university of South Carolina, 1992,
in Preface to the 1995 Scribner edition of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Isn’t that the trick though?
Much
like Their Eyes Were Watching God by
Zora Neale Hurston, I did not go into the book expecting too much and found a
true classic of literature that I soundly recommend people read. If you read it
before, read it again. It is the type of book where you will find something new
at a different age.
