The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and a devastating expose of the "Jazz Age". Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore in the 1920s, to encounter Nick's cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the mystery that surrounds him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848703629

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University in 1913, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and he quickly became a central figure in the American expatriate circle in Paris that included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four.

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Contents

General Introduction

Introduction

Notes to the Introduction

Bibliography

The Great Gatsby

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Notes to The Great Gatsby

General Introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

Introduction

The ‘constant flicker’ of the American scene

Why is The Great Gatsby such a quintessential twentieth-century novel? After mixed reviews and a slow start in sales, Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel has moved to the centre of literary history, to the extent that to many readers this is the modern American novel. Gatsby is widely loved, and has achieved the unusual status of appealing to both that mythical creature the ‘Common Reader’ and an academic audience. The novel’s stature has increased exponentially with age, and it is probably regarded with more fondness and read with greater critical sophistication today than in the seventy-five years since its publication. One reason for the growing status of the novel might be that it was in many ways prescient. Prescient, first of all, in the narrow sense that Fitzgerald’s portrayal of dizzying, narcissistic wealth and its sudden corruption eerily prefigured the US stock-market’s 1929 ‘Great Crash’ and the subsequent Depression. But the novel was also astute in its mapping of a contemporary urban world: a technological, consumerist, leisure society seen here in one of its first fictional representations. Even on the very first page of the text, Nick Carraway’s narrative introduces us to a world of insistent modernity and technological innovation. He compares Gatsby’s ‘heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’ to that of a seismograph, ‘one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away’ (p. 3). Gatsby’s character is understood through comparison with a piece of recondite, advanced machinery. The impress of such technological modernity is felt throughout the text. Even comic touches often depend on such notation: ‘There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb’ (p. 26).

The narrator, Nick Carraway, will confess that what fascinates him about New York is its mechanical vitality: ‘the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye’ (p. 37 – my emphasis). This strangely oxymoronic ‘constant flicker’ is characteristic of the novel, and Nick uses the phrase again to describe the ceaseless glints of light on the city’s shining, metallic surfaces: ‘Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars’ (p. 44). ‘Constant flicker’ echoes a key phrase from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (written 1899; published 1902), a text which we know played an important part in teaching Fitzgerald about the organisation of narrative. Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, surveys British imperial history and the history of civilisations, imagining empire as a ‘ running blaze on a plain ’. Now, he says, ‘ We live in the flicker. ’ [1] Fitzgerald shifts ‘the flicker’ to the US, where it functions as the distinctive symbol of modernity, of the new. The flicker of electric light off a car; the flicker of an image as movie film clatters through a projector; the flicker of the distracted modern consciousness. The flickering of consciousness is particularly important, and Nick’s distinctive state of mind is one of edgy alertness – an alertness that is very urban and modern. As he becomes fascinated with Gatsby’s war record, for instance, Nick reflects: ‘My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines’ (p. 43). ‘Skimming’, like flickering, is a verb at the centre of the Gatsby world, and note too how Nick imagines himself skimming a ‘dozen magazines’ (a powerful image of febrile superficiality).

This is a novel of glancing but pinpoint details, shards of recognition gradually pieced together into a mosaic of American modernity. What makes the novel modern and therefore not Victorian is its alert receptivity to a culture that had first begun to emerge around the time of Fitzgerald’s birth (1896) and had established itself in the 1910s and 1920s. Fitzgerald was born into the America of the horse, gaslight and railroad, but by 1925 the world was made of electricity, cars and telephones. Think about all the things we see in the novel, how new they were in 1925 (‘new’ is one of Gatsby’s favourite words) and how perceptively noted these details are. The 1920s were a decade of great technological innovation and circulation, when many of the inventions of the previous thirty years finally achieved a common currency in American society: electricity, especially electric lighting; cars; tele-phones; the movies and photography.

In The Great Gatsby these discoveries are ever-present, and are felt as new, creating strangely disconcerting effects in the lives of characters. Most readers remember the novel as tremendously atmospheric, but the ambient effects rest on Fitzgerald’s precise details of light and colour. Electric light, for instance, creates a strange, Edward Hopper-esque urban lyricism. Early in the novel Carraway notes how the ‘new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light’ (p. 15). Short, lovely passages punctuate the narrative, creating memorable effects of lighting:

I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It was dark here; only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass. [p. 69]

A poetic effect, certainly; but what such images do is to create a repeated pattern of strangeness in the text – resonant metaphors for the glamour, allure and ultimate artificiality of the jazz age.

Stylistically, the text itself is ‘lit’ by a succession of bright, jewel-like sentences and phrases. For Nick’s first-person narrative creates a written counterpart to the material world of Gatsby. Like Gatsby’s shirts, the narrative is gorgeous and shining, opulent, almost too much. It is built around a parade of glittering effects, brilliant phrases, bursts of poeticism; Nick illuminates his meditations with sudden, radiant images. ‘A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor’ (p. 63). The surreal luxury of Gatsby’s mansion is rendered in terms of how extravagantly lit the building is:

When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner, I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar. [p. 52]

Gatsby learnt from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) that modern urban settings could be given symbolic and even mythic resonance; the ‘valley of ashes’ episode is often seen as a sour, Eliotic contemporary landscape. In this passage, that strangely unidiomatic phrase (in a novel where the phrasing seems uncannily acute) ‘fell unreal’ recalls T. S. Eliot’s lines:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many. [2]

Fitzgerald had adapted Eliot’s sense of the contemporary landscape to an American setting, creating an analogous amalgamation of the modern and the mythic. For Eliot, the London Underground was unmistakably contemporary and also freighted with overtones of Hades. For Fitzgerald, these blazing lights create a similar effect: brazenly new, but reaching back into fairytale to suggest a magical castle. For Fitzgerald and Eliot the new city-scape is ‘unreal’, but Fitzgerald inverts Eliot’s sense of place. Eliot’s unreal London is brown, foggy, subterranean. Fitzgerald’s New York is bright, even blazing, and structured around the height of Gatsby’s mansion or advertising billboards or Manhattan’s buildings; it is a delicious confection, ‘the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps’ (p. 44).

Artificial light creates an original form of American landscape, a kind of urban pastoral that is both natural and man-made. The novel will then develop a contrast between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ through these lighting effects. Gatsby’s meeting with Daisy in Chapter 5 is poetically organised around an interplay between real and artificial light. When Nick returns, Daisy and Gatsby have had their chat. ‘He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.’ And when it stops raining, Gatsby ‘smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light’ (p. 57). On the next page Gatsby declares: ‘ My house looks well, doesn’t it? . . . See how the whole front of it catches the light ’ (p. 58). Meanwhile, the buttons on Daisy’s dress ‘gleamed in the sunlight’ (p. 58). The details here mesh together, all turning around images of light and sunshine. The key question about Jay Gatsby is here being posed poetically. Is Gatsby a natural being, a genuine bringer of sunshine? Or is the light he brings to Daisy (and Nick too) artificial – a lighting effect produced by money rather than personality?

The car is central to the novel, and is used both as a symbol of the new civilisation and, even more daringly, as a dynamic part of the plot. Thus, as they drive into Manhattan, Nick and Gatsby notice a car: a ‘limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl’ (p. 44). The race of the occupants (registered with Nick’s typical abruptness) and the luxurious extravagance of the car complement one another. Unsettling, exciting, modern New York is both a technological and a dynamic cultural space. This is how the novel works: through the compression of sociological or cultural insights into the ‘flicker’ of brief, flashing images. Again, at one point Nick complains that his own car is ‘old’: ‘I had a dog – at least I had him for a few days until he ran away – and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove’ (p. 4). With this one adjective Fitzgerald reveals a world where a young man can already own a car and, even more tellingly, where he can bemoan its age. Brand names are also important – the car is a Dodge. Newness is now vital to one’s personality. Jay Gatsby is a fascinating character, and distinctively of his society, because he simply extends this observation into a principle of behaviour. Just as Nick would really like a new car, and laments his old one, so Gatsby trades in his old self for a new one. The Great Gatsby explores, through this kind of logical circuit, the consumerisation of the self, a self constituted of surfaces.

Fitzgerald’s carelessness about facts and empirical knowledge is well known: he frequently wrote about France when his knowledge of French was poor; his spelling (in French and English) was execrable. In Gatsby he touches on subjects (notably, the doings on Wall Street) about which he knew little and imagined a good deal. His fiction tends to circumvent these problems by selecting significant realistic detail rather than accumulating a mass of facts. As a record of a particular time and place, the novel is focused, selective and distilled: a historical concentrate. Fitzgerald rejected the massively accretive Realism pioneered by a previous generation of American novelists (including Theodore Dreiser and William Dean Howells); instead, he concentrated on deploying representative and symbolic details.

It is also a novel where phone conversations are very important. There are around a dozen moments where phones are seen being used, in a variety of contexts. Most significantly, Nick gains the vital clue to Gatsby’s criminality in Slagle’s aborted phone call from Chicago.

‘Young Parke’s in trouble,’ he said rapidly. ‘They picked him up when he handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New York giving ’em the numbers just five minutes before. What d’you know about that, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns – ’ [p. 106]

Note the rapid, breathless rhythm of the speech, and that Slagle’s commentary is based on a misunderstanding (he thinks he is talking to Gatsby); it is a keenly urban way of speaking, where the American hinterland is abruptly dismissed as ‘ hick towns ’. Fitzgerald realised that the phone had altered the ways in which we speak and listen, and that patterns of social interaction were consequently being transformed. The new conversational style, brought into being by the telephone and a capital market (‘bonds’, ‘circular’), is edgy, fractured and elliptical; it is also informal, marked by colloquialisms and slangy outbursts. Crucially, the telephone conversation can conceal as much as it reveals. We cannot see the speaker at the other end, so inference of tone becomes important. To the listener who overhears someone on the phone, there is further complexity (what is being said at the other end?). To the contemporary, accustomed to the technology, these might seem banal or obvious points. But Fitzgerald registers the impact of the telephone with an anthropologist’s eye for the idiosyncrasies of quotidian behaviour. The elusiveness and mystery of phone conversation is used to give a modern feel to one of the novel’s questions: how do we ‘know’ what lies within the human heart? Nick might never know the final truth about Gatsby; and Gatsby himself misunderstands Daisy. But the novel’s catalogue of elusive and fractured phone conversations poignantly and ironically suggest that even in an age when communication is supposedly getting easier, misunderstanding proliferates.

‘In making us a homogeneous people,’ announced a telephone advertisement in 1915, ‘the telegraph and the telephone have been important factors.’ [3] That the phone would help to unify a vast and diverse nation was one of the early claims of the telephone companies; but The Great Gatsby sardonically notes the criminal usage of technology. Gatsby can only maintain his shady contacts back in the Midwestern towns of Detroit and Chicago because the telephone has now shrunk the United States. To a large extent, he has only been able to get away with it because he is physically removed from the places where his crimes take place. He drives into Manhattan; he telephones Chicago. West Egg itself is a kind of glittering retreat, umbilically linked by phone wire and road to the sites of the actual criminality. The telephone thus aids and abets that most typical of American fictional characters, the confidence man. Stories about confidence men, about trickery, imposture and conning, were important in earlier American writing; Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) are the most famous works within this notable sub-genre. Confidence has been an important theme for American writers because it enables the novelist to explore, in plots constructed from sensationalist tales of duplicity and trickery, the nature of community in the new nation. The confidence theme provides a dark, antiphonal voice to the republican brotherhood celebrated by Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Great Gatsby is the confidence novel rewritten for the modern machine age. Now, trickery and gulling have been given a further twist: Fitzgerald’s protagonists cannot even see those who might be tricking them. At least in the nineteenth-century novel of confidence (as with those conmen ‘the King’ and ‘the Duke’ in Huckleberry Finn), one could rely on face-to-face contact; Nick Carraway finds himself in a yet more duplicitous world, where crooks, criminals and conmen talk by phone.

A fourth sign of Fitzgerald’s fascination with American modernity can be seen in the novel’s references to film and its technical indebtedness to both cinema and photography. The novel is very much written as a dialogue with movie culture. Guests at Gatsby’s parties include film stars, and Myrtle’s first action when she arrives in New York is to buy ‘Town Tattle and a moving-picture magazine’ (p. 18). But there is a more general cinematic or photographic feel to the text, as cinema starts to shape (however indirectly or subtly) the construction of fictional narrative. Fitzgerald had learnt from the Joseph Conrad of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim the value of a highly-shaped narrative, emphasising tight cutting and concision. His own novel then fused this modernist narratology with a cinematic formalism: The Great Gatsby’s concision and splicing together of scenes echo the urgent rhythm of film. The novel’s visual immediacy also reminds us that this was the age when photography began to be popularised and domesticated. Fitzgerald generates an extended comic passage from his character Mr McKee, a photographer who creates banal

Reviews for The Great Gatsby

[beth.clarke · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The classic novel of the lost American Dream. I love reading this book. I feel like each page necessary and adds to the story. Set in the 1920's with prohibition and dancing creates the perfect setting. I love reading about Daisy, and how my opinion of her has changed since first reading the novel back in high school. BTW - I now find her shallow and a gold-digger. I love that the man trying to relive his past is shown to be a fool. My favorite sections of the book are the vivid scenes that make me feel like I'm there watching. The dress shirts in Gatsby's room - getting drunk in the hotel - the car wreck, etc.

[wrightja2000 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I don't like reading about selfish people. I know that's the point and it's beautifully written but I want to like the people I'm reading about, at least one character. The characters and the story line make me nauseous. Blech....

[marient_5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jay Gatsby has moved to West Egg in search of his love, Daisy, who is now married to Tom Buchanan. Carraway, Gatsby's next door neithbor narrates the book.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

What's one to do in the wake of this incandescence? I disagree with Nabokov. This is brilliant (though so is Tender Is The Night). Thinking quite a bit today about Pound and Bunny (Wilson). What about Wharton and the Master - Henry James? All this re-imagining, all this space to plot a counter movement, a line of transgression. Prisms of nature are revealed. The viewer's eye is stimulated by money and possibility. The senses blurred in a haze of exhaust fumes and gin. My thinking of this novel now has been colored by Sarah Churchwell's thesis in careless people, that can't be helped. Despite our failures, there's always sex and strange lights.

[booktsunami · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had the feeling that I had read this book years ago. Maybe I saw it as a movie and now a new version of the movie has come out. At any event, I was really moved to read it because I had started reading a book by Roy Peter Clark called The Art of X Ray Reading. It's really about literary analysis and the first example he uses is "The Great Gatsby" and it piqued my curiosity. And, I rather liked the prose extracts that Clark uses. So I bought the book. And when I found it was so short I read it quite quickly. I'm not really a great reader of fiction but thought Fitzgerald's book was a delight. A tight story line, great characterisation, and the script itself almost like poetry...."For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at the fall of dusk". And this: "There was music from my neighbour's house through the simmer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars." New York in the twenties .....decadence and wealth on display. Casual immorality such as Tom Buchanan keeping a mistress. And Daisy's presumed infidelity......is not really judged by the narrator. He does't condemn doesn't condone...merely reports like a good reporter recording the facts. The mystery surrounding Jay Gatsby develops throughout the book. There are intricate connections such as between the green light at the start of the book and at the end...but also precisely in the middle. The mysterious phone call from Chicago after Gatsby's death about "Young Parke" being in trouble when he handed the bonds over the counter. No other explanations ..a seemingly disconnected piece of information that throws a distinct shadow over Jay Gatsby's financial dealings. The Oxford connection ....assumed by Tom Buchanan to be phony ...but shown to probably be real...and Carraway "had one of those renewals of complete faith in him".Or this: "He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. 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. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour".I really like the book. Must admit that I have never really been a great fan of some of the other American classics such as "Catcher in the Rye" and "to Kill a Mockingbird". But Gatsby I liked. Was there a moral in there somewhere.....well maybe the idea that money doesn't necessarily buy happiness. Or maybe, in hindsight, that this kind of corrupt lifestyle was setting them up for the great depression. And there is the class stratification clearly drawn between old money in East Egg and new money in West Egg. And the "unutterable truth " that it was not Gatsby that killed Myrtle ...but Daisy......Daisy and Tom ...were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or vast carelessness....and let other people clean up the mess they had made. But overall, it was a story well-told. Happy to recommend this book.

[amarillo_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Great American Novel? Discuss.

[stpnwlf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting rags to riches to oblivion novel.

[cestovatela · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A powerful slice of nouveau riche New York.

[yorkjob_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the first novels to reach out and speak to the humanity within me. This is an important work.

[hamlet61-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the best books ever written in the English language. It is moving and still; purposeful and lost; tragic and somehow hopeful.

[aapjebaapje · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Borrowed froma friend at Bracklesham Bay. A classic and I can see why. Although a little thin on character it was an excellent story. Almost a sketch for a film!

[kellyholmes-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I "had" to read this in high school and loved it.

[rybeewoods · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Easy read. Good read. Fun read. Who doesn't like the Great Gatsby?

[raphaelmatto · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps my favorite book. I love the characters, the dialog, & the absence of the narrator.

[fodroy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everyone should read this book.

[antao-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

(Original review, 1981-04-30)“The Great Gatsby” is essentially a love story. Daisy turns out to be as unattainable to Jay as Beatrice was to Dante but this being the US, the hero doesn't elevate his idol to muse status; instead he embarks on a ruthless pursuit that ends up destroying him.It's difficult in the present era of throwaway relationships to comprehend the extent of Gatsby's romantic obsession. The questions are: 1) would he have taken to crime had Daisy returned his love and told her wealthy family to go to hell and 2) did he love Daisy precisely because she was a romantic chimera, a glamorous woman who represented a rarefied world he wished to conquer?Fitzgerald himself never abandoned his sick wife Zelda even when advised to divorce her. He worked himself ragged to pay the high costs of her medical treatments and stays in various clinics. I think it's true to say his own health was ruined because of his devotion and sense of responsibility to his wife.But then Fitzgerald was a man born into a more chivalrous era, so it's not really surprising that he should produce works like Tender is the Night and the Great Gatsby.One interesting bit I'm surprised many have overlooked is that Nick Carraway and Jordan both appear to be gay. Not the first one to think of this-- lots written on the topic - but hard to get more obvious than the scene where, after leaving Myrtle's party, Nick winds up in the bedroom of the effete artist where they are both in their underwear. In the 1920s, Fitzgerald would not have been allowed to write a gay sex scene, but this comes pretty darn close. Many other clues - Nick's massive man crush on Gatsby, the fact that he doesn't date, doesn't seem to have any interest in women beyond Jordan, the mannish female golf pro (Nick's descriptions of her make her seem very mannish anyway), very vague about why he wasn't marrying his former fiancé despite the fact that it was expected of him and he couldn't go through with it.) Nick's homosexuality is interesting as both a side note and for what it says that we are seeing Gatsby through the gaze of someone with a massively illicit (for the time) crush on him who builds him up and then tears him down.The chattering class in Portugal have always had a different definition of the "American Dream" than actual Americans, for whom its essence is owning a home and raising children who have it a bit easier than you did. Both of those aspirations, for that is what the dream is, are in bad shape at the moment. The Portuguese and the Western world in general seem to think the American Dream is some feverish conception of mansions and millions...As for Gatsby, it's the language I enjoy. Should we at abandon wondering at Gatsby to avoid existential bewilderment. Or falter forward and be lost in the aftermath of wonder. Or remain entrenched in conservative certainty. Perhaps it's why so many of us reread this novel. It's also damn fine prose.

[olivia_atlet_writer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the decrepit side of the American Dream, which truly erupted during the 1920s. With a darkness stirring inside Gatsby, a feeling of loneliness takes hold, and his longing for an old flame sparks into reality. Readers come to learn that life as a glamourous host is not all it’s cracked up to be; his heart, head, and identity is jumbled beyond recognition; the person he could have married is seemingly unattainable; the green light he is so set on is merely a feebly lit lantern. All in all, superficiality reigns supreme in the mansion Gatsby calls his “home”.The snazzy millionaire changed everything about himself, from his name to the uneducated dialect of his youth. While watching his story unfold, one uncovers the languished lifestyle of the rich and infamous. Looking for a taste of champagne with a dash of insanity? Pick up this book and join the party, old sport.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I read this book in print years ago. I didn't really enjoy it that much then. This time I listened to the audio version narrated by Anthony Heald. As much as I wanted to like the book better, I didn't. I just hate the characters and do not relate to them. While I recognize the writing is quite good, I simply do not like the story.

[vhartpowers · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The beginning i fragmented and awkward, but it picks up speed in the middle.
I immediately liked Owl Eyes. He ends up being one of the very few to attend Gatsby's funeral.
I dislike Daisy and Tom. I feel sorry for Gatsby.
his unethical business partner or the man that made him rich, told Nick Carroway, pg. 180 "Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." (Meyer Wolfsheim)
I also didn't like the abstract descriptions given, almost out of context.
Most of the characters behave as victims of their lives when they made the choices. (they didn't take responsibility.)
It's an okay book. I don't understand why it's a classic. I don't feel it surpasses time. I didn't understand a lot of the "current lingo" of the book.

[anne8tillery · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is known as a "classic American novel." I think it is a great example of life during the 1920s. It also gives an outlook to what a good person should be in Fitzgerald's eyes and the idea that money corrupts. I like the concept of a character like Gatsby who chased a dream that corrupted him. It shows that you can't always rely on people for all your happiness. The diction and syntax is very impressive as well.

[cattylj-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Money can't buy you love, and it'll probably ruin your life. But you'll have a lot of beautiful shirts to distract you.

[chris_el-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At it's core it's about ambition. Not avarice seeking satisfaction in having or gaining the material per se but the longing for happiness. And how so often it dangles just beyond our grasp.

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

[sydneyp.b1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Great Gatsby takes place in 1922 in the state of New York. The story is narrated by a man of the name Nick Carraway, who moves to the city for the bond business. Carraway meets up with his past friend Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy, extravagant girl, who's the spouse of Tom Buchanan. Carraway also befriends his mysterious, extremely wealthy neighbor Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is a man who was born to a poor family, but has spent his whole life building himself up in any way he can, even in illegal ways, to get money,which he believes will somehow complete him as a person. Carraway finds out that Gatsby once had a relationship with Daisy, and now, Gatsby wants Carraway to help him rekindle their relationship. Once Carraway does this, Gatsby and Daisy once again fall in love, and they begin having an affair. Later in the book, Gatsby tries to get Daisy to tell her husband Tom that she wants to leave him, but she admits that deep down she once loved Tom and will not leave him. Later that night, Daisy is driving Gatsby home, and she accidentally hits Myrtle Wilson (Tom Buchanan's mistress), and kills her. Mr. Wilson, in a fit of rage and anger believes that the car was being driven by Gatsby, so he goes and kills Gatsby with a gunshot. Gatsby's funeral is held, and even though his life was spent with hundreds of people around him, only few come to his funeral. Daisy flees with her family, leaving before the funeral occurs, and Carraway attends the funeral, and then returns to his original home, Minnesota. The Great Gatsby is sayed to be an all-time classic. I personally, believe it completely deserves that title. The author Fitzgerald is able to intrigue the reader constantly, and completely incaptivate them with his words.The story has so many metaphors and ideas within it, it's almost impossible to grasp its full meaning. I think the story is beautiful, and elegantly written. It is completely worthy of four stars.

[jackd180 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Great Gatsby was excellent; however i found it to be very difficult to understand. With so many characters and so many names it becomes very difficult to understand. there were several time in this book where i completely was lost and had no clue who was talking, what was going on, or where the characters where. Having read the book after seeing the movie was probably not the best decision. The movie does't ever compare to the book; however, because i saw the movie first and wasn't 100% sure what was happening i lost some enjoyment that the book had to offer. The story the book tells is excellent, and i feel that this is a book that everyone must at least try to read, but I warn you to take it slow. If you rush through this book you will miss key details that are vital to the story.

[v_allery · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I cannot honestly say that I particularly enjoyed The Great Gatsby, I might need a couple of more reads to get there; however, the fact that I do not completely dismiss it and think about re-reading it, tells me that there is really something special about this story. Right now I might call it overrated, but I have a feeling that this book is the kind that would grow on me over time. There are things I enjoyed immensely, though - the sophisticated language, narration style, and the picture those things combined painted in my mind, and the characters that seemed vain on the surface, but complicated through and through.

[jimocracy · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was a bunch of pretentious garbage.

[oscarwilde87_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Who is Jay Gatsby? An Oxford man, entrepreneur, bootlegger, host to illustrious parties, owner of a Long Island mansion, adulterer? Maybe the "Great Gatsby" is all of the latter. Maybe he is not. F. Scott Fitzgerald's work is a character study of a man who is very secretive about his past and has a clear and idealistic vision of his future. In the end, it is all about a girl - Daisy. In The Great Gatsby the reader follows the protagonist in the search of a long lost love right until his death.One can identify the American attitude towards the past as a major theme in this novel. When the reader gets to know Jay Gatsby through the first-person narration of Nick Carraway, Gatsby's neighbor in Long Island, all that is revealed is the status quo. Gatsby lives in West Egg, Long Island, has a huge mansion, is very rich, wears a suit and throws parties for basically everyone who wants to come. When Carraway finally gets invited to Gatsby's house and Gatsby shows some interest in Carraway, the reader gets the chance of learning more about Gatsby. As soon as Nick starts inquiring into Gatsby's past, Gatsby tells him that he was an Oxford man, had been in the military and was from the Midwest, San Francisco to be exact. That is the first time that the reader gets a hint that Gatsby does not always tell the truth and seems to be very secretive about his past. Putting San Francisco in the Midwest while at the same time claiming to have lived there casts some serious doubts about everything else that Gatsby shares about his past. In the end we learn that not even his name is real. He is actually James Gatz from North Dakota and has been in the bootlegging business. During the time of his military service he fell in love with Daisy Buchanan, now the wife of Tom Buchanan, who lives just across the shore from his Long Island house. Having everything else in life, Gatsby wants to win Daisy back. This, however, leads to chaos and finally Gatsby's death. All in all, Gatsby is a man who seems to live for a future that he imagines can only be a bright and successful one. He tries to conceal his past as much as possible. The Great Gatsby was written in the early 1920s and it can certainly be read as a novel depicting the American Dream with its idealism and future-orientation on the one hand, and its downsides and elusiveness on the other.There are several reasons why I liked The Great Gatsby a lot. There is, for instance, its theme. And then there is Fitzgerald's way of working with language. He really manages to say just enough and seems to find the right words in every single sentence. What is more, there are the perfectly crafted characters and a first-person narrator with his willing suspension of disbelief that contributes to an overall great story.To my mind, The Great Gatsby is a powerful novel and might be considered one of the Great American Novels. 5 stars.

[erinhoover17 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book! It flowed nicely and kept me interested throughout the entire book.

[katemiller1724 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm having a difficult time with reviewing this book. On one hand, it is a classic with a solid message, but on the other hand I wasn't moved by this work. For any work of fiction to really effect me, I must be able to relate to the characters, or at least to be able to develop some kind of affection for them. When it comes to characters like Jay Gatsby, Tom or Daisy Buchanan, and even Jordan Baker I cannot care for them anymore than they cared for anyone else. All of these characters were so selfish, and self centered that I found myself generally disgusted with them. Nick Carraway wasn't much better, but at least he tried his best for his "friends". Then of course, there is the immaturity of Gatsby and his juvenile conquest of Daisy. What man would spend so much time building up an entire life to win back a girl he had only known for a couple months, at most. I understand the idea of everlasting love, and passion beyond reason, but Gatsby seemed slightly off his rocker with it. So, while I was not moved by the characters in this book, it did not leave a lasting impression on me, and I do not care to reread it, I can accept and appreciate the messages which Fitzgerald puts forth:1. Do not live in the past. It is already gone and though you may run and reach for it, it will forever slip out of your grasp.2. Do not live for others. Poor Mr. Wilson was a simple man with a simple life. He worked hard everyday to make his wife happy, and his wife was never happy. And, this story ended badly for both of them. 3. Money can not buy happiness. Gatsby is portrayed in many ways as living the "Great American Dream". He has wealth beyond belief, supposed friends, and can do anything he pleases. What he can't do with his mountains of money is relive, or retrieve, the love of his past. ..."So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"...

[hatease · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nick Carraway moves to New York to learn about the bond business. He becomes neighbors with Jay Gatsby who lives in a huge mansion and throws huge parties every Saturday night. Motifs, The American Dream8th grade- High School