There are a lot of reasons to dislike this piece of fiction, the jazz age, the elitist culture and the hollow American dream, but most of all, it’s the characters, they are so unlikeable, one can only jab their pen in their eye once while reading the atrociously demented stunts pulled by them.
And now speaking whether the book is appreciable or not, it just might be if you are capable of carrying contempt for these people.
The book’s title suggests that this man—Gatsby, is presumably a great character and then for almost four-fifth of the book, we only read instances that suggest he is nothing but a new money youngster who believes in flaunting, hiding, twisting people and going out of his way to create more and more uncomfortable situations as time passes by.
Fitzgerald had a lifestyle as extravagant as Gatsby’s, he began with ‘the beautiful and damned’, it wasn’t his fault the twenties were so scarred. He did explore a dark side of that time; the timeline was just as problematic as the characters.
In the last twenty pages of the book, the title does make sense. The most humane thing is to be so bad at so many things but being right for just one instance and it could create all the difference.
To summarize, the book begins with an introduction of characters from the protagonist, Nick Carraway, we see the entire story through his lens, just how shallow his sister and his brother-in-law are, just how charismatic Jordan Baker is with her long legs and a successful career for a woman in those times, yet just as shallow as her friend Daisy Buchanan, her husband Tom, a racist, sexist and obnoxious specimen of a man, for today’s time of course, back then he has been described as quite the stud. As the story unfolds, we are introduced to the ‘great’ Gatsby in an extraordinarily ordinary setting, the one where he was just unrecognizable, hard to believe for a man of his stature but later on it makes sense, he never bothered with being truly known to the populace who arrived at his doorstep, even not being known costed him his life because of Tom’s affair, Myrtle Wilson, nothing but a sorry character, added too much to the plot. It was very expected and obvious that the book would end on a sad note with no one being there for Gatsby.
The one and only flaw in the writing has ought to be the over usage of ‘ought’.
Nick Carraway’s description of every character was right, if there was a sentence said by him that could describe each character, it would be one simple task. HERE his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart, tom, it was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life, Gatsby, she was incurably dishonest, Jordan, the very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image….leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger, Gatsby, she has a voice full of money, daisy, I am a little too old to lie to myself and call it honour.
Out of all the characters intentionally being described as shallow, Gatsby was described so in an extravagant manner, flashy, tacky and still unknown. “The world and its mistress arrived on Gatsby’s doorstep”, there could be many thoughts that would have crossed the writer’s mind with this sentence, the world and its mistress—gossip, always arrived at the loud and bright mansion, gossip is indeed the homewrecker, or maybe the mistress was simply the woman every man brought to those parties, every except for their wives, who never got to have such fun, the sentence held more meaning when the world didn’t arrive at James Gatz’s funeral, but the mistress sure did.
Gatsby, a character so hard to watch and hear, finally gives us realization why he was so great, he held onto a dream for so long, so long that it became an illusion. He gave up everything for Daisy, if aversion had a face, it would be mine when I hear of Daisy Buchanan, every character has a reason, to be the way they are, usually a story is defined as great by the development of the characters in it, but if there was any development, this story simply wouldn’t make sense, for Gatsby to be great, everyone else had to be broken to an extent in a way that seems unrealistically bizarre.
“He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.” He was also a moronic display of love, not in a way that it is stupid to love like that, what’s ghastly is that he loved like that and died with nothing, he had one wish, to not be alone and he still was.
The book might not be a perfect classic, but it is indeed a proclaimed classic, I have watched a series and two movies based in publishing industry, each one of them talked about Gatsby, the book wasn’t something that makes you think it is the best I have ever read, but to be a reader and not read it once in life, simply doesn’t make sense to me, because this book from the beginning to the end gives exactly what it makes us think it would give.
The book alongside the plot, shows very clearly what American society must have been like back then, “Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” Absolutely, every character did justice to this one single line in the book and the sanest one was Nick, the greatest is still GATSBY.