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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Start date: March 2, 2015

Finish date: March 31, 2015

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Apr 20, 2014 David Ciferri rated it it was amazing

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is hugely popular and a literary classic. It deserves both distinctions.

Who was The Great Gatsby? The short answer is James Gatz, who came from a poor farming family but left North Dakota at seventeen with a driving instinct for glory. In reinventing himself as Jay Gatsby he took on the persona he needed to pursue this glory.

As a lieutenant in World War I Gatsby met Daisy Fay of Louisville, and from that moment his drive fused with the limitless love he f F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is hugely popular and a literary classic. It deserves both distinctions.

Who was The Great Gatsby? The short answer is James Gatz, who came from a poor farming family but left North Dakota at seventeen with a driving instinct for glory. In reinventing himself as Jay Gatsby he took on the persona he needed to pursue this glory.

As a lieutenant in World War I Gatsby met Daisy Fay of Louisville, and from that moment his drive fused with the limitless love he felt for her. Daisy married another, wealthier, man while Gatsby was at war. Then the war ended, and Gatsby set out to claim her.

Daisy lived in splendor on Long Island. Gatsby made a fortune (don’t ask how) and bought a mansion across the bay from her. He threw fabulous parties for hundreds of people on the chance she would wander by. When she didn’t, he found other means of pursuit.

The novel sounds highly plotted, but in fact the narrative is slight. The story is held aloft by Fitzgerald’s dazzling, idiosyncratic descriptive style. His narrator, Nick Carraway (Daisy’s cousin and Gatsby’s neighbor), takes the reader through Jazz Age New York apartments, Long Island palaces, and coal-smoked wastelands with a keen eye and a singular verve. He answers the question asked by almost everyone taking up the novel – Why is Gatsby great? – in part by contrasting him with the feckless fops who attend his parties. While the partygoers slosh through liquor, babble inanities, and smash up Rolls Royces, Gatsby single-mindedly pursues his dream of love. He enjoys the trappings of wealth, but he would throw his mansion, his car, and every last silk shirt on one of the novel’s famous ash heaps if doing so would win him Daisy.

What about Daisy? To many readers she comes off as shallow and, at story’s end, even callous. Why does Gatsby love her? The question is unanswerable. I think Fitzgerald daringly placed an unsympathetic character at the center of Gatsby’s affections to show that love is experienced by the individual, not the multitude.

For me, having read the novel more than once over the course of many years, the title fits its subject. As for Daisy, I don’t love her. In fact, I don’t even like her. But what of it? I’m not The Great Gatsby.
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