Book Review by Heidi Simmons
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The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Novel
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The great American novel is something everyone wants to read and American authors long to write. It is a narrative which encompasses place, time and attitude that accurately depicts our nation’s culture, lifestyle and experience. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Scribner, 192 pages) certainly manages these requirements and gives the reader a glimpse of our world and our selves.
Once again, The Great Gatsby has been made into a movie and is currently playing in theaters. If you have never read Gatsby or if you haven’t read it since you were required to read it in high school, it’s worth picking up and spending time with. The book is a quick and colorful read. There are passages worth savoring, characters worth knowing and themes worth considering.
The story is narrated first person by Nick Carraway, a young Ivy League graduate, who takes a job selling bonds in New York in 1922. He rents a small cottage near a lavish mansion owned by Jay Gatsby. It is a Long Island-like fictional community called West Egg where the nouveau-riche have built homes across the bay from East Egg where the old money and old mansions reside.
Carraway’s cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan, a college chum, live directly across the water from Gatsby’s place. It’s no accident. Gatsby is in love with Daisy, and before she married Tom, the feeling was mutual. Daisy comes from a well-known, wealthy family; Gatsby’s a no one and has no money. But he is a handsome officer heading to serve in WW1 and she promised to wait for him.
The broken promise motivates Gatsby to accumulate wealth and earn a respectable reputation to win her away from her husband. He throws extravagant parties in hopes she will attend.
Carraway and Gatsby become friends when Gatsby enlists him to arrange a reunion with Daisy. They are reunited and their love is rekindled. But it is a relationship doomed from the start and a tragedy in the making. The gap between them too strong and too wide.
Jay Gatsby is a great American literary character. He reinvents himself, builds a new life and fortune. He is desperately in love and solely focused on obtaining Daisy. But it is not enough. Gatsby is an outsider.
Fitzgerald captures the class differences and the energy of the changing culture. The country is prospering. There is a newly rich class that lacks refinement and the respect of the old aristocracy. The author uses Carraway to show the reader the true nature of the characters in the novel. The aristocracy is careless about hurting others. They are bullies and able to distance themselves from trouble. Gatsby is generous, loyal and allows his heart to dictate his actions.
In the story, there is an old billboard for an optometrist with a giant pair of eyes wearing enormous spectacles. The sign is aged and worn and located between the contrasting world of New York and East and West Egg located in a no man’s zone of ash and soot. They are like the eyes of God watching as the characters live out their lives. This significant sign adding to the theme and relevance of the narrative was incorporated into the book from the publisher’s commissioned artwork for the cover. It so impressed Fitzgerald he put it into the story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald may have coined the phrase “The Jazz Age.” His novels and short stories were mostly all written in the roaring twenties. He himself was from a well-to-do family and he and his wife Zelda were a part of the era’s aristocracy, although they were not flush with money. Fitzgerald died in 1940. He was 44 years old.
The Great Gatsby may not be a profound account of love and life, or a hugely substantive narrative about reality, but it reveals our tremendous human condition of weakness and vulnerability. Underneath our protective layer of skin, we all want to be loved.
