I first read The Great Gatsby years ago as a school kid, but I can remember barely anything about what I thought of it. For such a feted novel, it’s a very conventional one structurally. Its originality comes from the way it is rooted in its time and anatomises it so perfectly.
It’s set in upstate New York in the 1920s, and the just concluded war looms over everything. Nick Carraway – the narrator – has moved into a house in West Egg. His neighbour is a mysterious modern Croesus, the Gatsby of the title. Gatsby hosts extravagant parties, but he never involves himself in them, always standing apart and observing.
The novel’s two great themes are status – what we British would call class – and the inability to perfect the past. Gatsby is an impostor and is widely rumoured to be involved in bootlegging and other unsavoury businesses.
Where it seems as though the scale is going to be epic, in fact Gatsby is intimate. In many ways it can be thought of as a love story; all Gatsby’s attention is focused on Nick’s friend Daisy Buchanan, who lives with her husband Tom over the water in East Egg. It turns out that Gatsby knew her before the war as a young and penniless drifter. Now he wants to perfect that picture by erasing it and and making Daisy his in his new world.
All of Gatsby’s elaborate parties were a honey trap; he hoped that their notoriety would be such that Daisy was bound to come to one. As it is, he has to contrive a meeting through the agency of his neighbour, Nick. This scene is the centre of the book, and so brilliantly and subtly written that it almost sits out of the mind’s reach.
What characterises the book is extremely beautiful, almost effortless writing, with an incredibly sharp eye for details of behaviour that reveal hidden depths of character, but also, below the surface, never explicit, a deep critique of the decade itself, hurtling as it is toward its financial and moral doom.
It’s almost a redundant thing to say, but I’ll do so anyway: The Great Gatsby is one of the most important books of the 20th century.
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One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.I agree with you as well – the Great Gatsby is indeed one of the most important novels of our time. The novel presents America in its totality – the rich, the poor and everyone in between. The distinctions between all being how much money each class possesses. In The Great Gatsby, the American Dream is tarnished. Where it once stood for hard work and the ability to make something out of oneself, in the novel, the dream is one of materialism and selfishness and the pursuit of pleasure. Merit, honesty and morality are lost values in the world of The Great Gatsby. For more information and The Great Gatsby quotes, you must visit this website called Shmoop. I found it very useful.