Classics Bookclub – The Great Gatsby

 This month’s read for the Classics Bookclub at 5 Minutes for Books was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby…the quintessential “great American novel.”

I love that word…quintessential.   Say it to yourself… quintessential…quintessential…quintessential.  Let’s make it our word of the day, shall we?

And now…back to the review…

I must be the only person in America who didn’t read this story in high school, so I came at it without any of those leftover my-English-teacher-made-me-read-it prejudices.  I’m really kind of glad about that.  I was able to enjoy the artistry of Fitzgerald’s prose as an adult.  I say that because I sincerely believe…for the most part…the significance of the allegory in this one will be lost on most high school students…not all…most.

In case you are unfamiliar with it, the story, set in the 1920s, is narrated by Nick Carraway, who lives in the imaginary Long Island neighborhood of West Egg and is a neighbor to Jay Gatsby.  Gatsby is a profusely wealthy but aloof  man who attained said wealth in ways that may be questionable…no one seems to know for sure.  What they do know is that his is “new” money, and there is the downfall.  It seems that Gatsby worked himself from ordinary farm boy from the Midwest to fabulously wealthy in order to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, who is unfortunately already married to old money in the form of her extremely selfish arrogant husband, Tom. Daisy and Tom live across the sound from Nick and Gatsby in East Egg, where old money resides.  Nick’s first glimpse of Gatsby is of him staring across the water at a mysterious green light with his arms held out toward it in longing.  The light lies as the end of the dock where Daisy lives.

Fitzgerald’s prose is wonderful:

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

The silver pepper of the stars…one of my favorite phrase in the entire book.

As I said, I would categorize the story as an allegory.  Gatsby is said to represent striving for the American dream, Daisy representing the dream and Gatsby himself the one who, no matter how hard he tries or what he is willing to do, can not attain it.  The dream remains always just out of reach.

As I read, I also thought of this passage from Ecclesiastes 2:

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my work,
and this was the reward for all my labor.

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.

I didn’t really find that I felt much for any of the characters, seeing them more as what they symbolized than as real people with real lives and feelings.  The emptiness of it all, which is probably why I thought of verses in Ecclesiastes, is what struck me. This is definitely not a happily-ever-after story. This may all make it sound like a bit of a downer, but I didn’t come out of it that way.  Like I said, the beauty of the language makes the read well worth it, but it also left me thinking about priorities…and that’s never a bad thing.

You will find other readers’ thoughts on this classic today at 5MFB.  

It seems that 5MFB is having a little trouble right now.  Hopefully that link will be back up and running a little later.

UPDATE: Everything seems to working now.

Encourage one another,