Now read this! F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Okay, okay. You’ve read The Great Gatsby. We’ve all read The Great Gatsby. You were assigned it in 8th grade, then in high school, and again in Freshman English in college (though your subsequent readings were the Cliff’s Notes!). And you still have that crushed paperback with the cheesy neon lights on the cover. You forgot all about it until you saw the movie on TV, and when Mia Farrow went orgasmic over Robert Redford’s tailored pink shirts, you thought, “Well, that’s enough of that!” (And you didn’t even know, thank God, about a remake with Mira Sorvino and Toby Stephens!)
Well, forget all that. You’re a grown-up now and you need to read Gatsby with a grown-up’s perspective.
Not, of course, that it’s about such grown-up people. Gatsby, in particular, remains the eternal man-boy throughout the book, fixated on Daisy and the wealth he’ll need to win her back, like you and I once obsessed over that perfect pair of shoes that would stun that particular girl (or boy) back when we were 14.
We’re all familiar with the story, and though it’s a corker, full of erotic obsession, adultery, lost love, jealousy, booze, gangsters and murder, the real reason to read and reread The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s prose.
Here’s the famous description of the road between West Egg and New York.
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The image of the doctor’s huge eyes is memorable enough, but the preceding paragraph is what gives that image its real power.
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s huge eyes are so potent because they rise up out of a contemporary Hell, vividly described, which the characters in the novel must pass through between their beautiful mansions, where their dreams are realized, and New York City, where the wealth their dreams are made with is created.
The two central characters, the narrator Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, are perfect bookends. Nick is careful and reticent, the repository of other men’s dreams and secrets and never, himself, one to take chances or push himself forward. He’s the perfect receptacle for such a story, because he’s essentially empty.
Gatsby, however flawed, perhaps criminally, however much a slave to his own dreams, however Daisy-whipped, is nonetheless a man of action who will stop at nothing to achieve everything.
But he’s also the King of Overkill, since, as we learn, Daisy is okay, but hardly a Cleopatra. She’s vain and shallow and slightly boring — all good reasons why her husband Tom cheats on her.
Here’s Gatsby described by Nick at the moment of his dream’s fulfillment.
I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! 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.
Ultimately, The Great Gatsby is about the wisdom, or lack thereof, we exercise in the selection of our aspirations, how it is the quality of our wishes or dreams that is the real test of the man or woman, far more than his or her ability to make the aspiration real.
No matter what your English teacher once told you, this is great stuff.
Other recommended works: Tender is the Night, The Pat Hobby Stories, and The Collected Short Stories.
Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.
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Great analysis of Fitzgerald’s novel. I would add another way of looking at The Great Gatsby: It is a novel in which people’s lives are exposed as being dominated by all sorts of artifice (as are many people’s lives), and we as readers remain insensitive to the ironies of this ironic novel if we become too comfortable in feeling superior to or removed from any single one of the novel’s characters.
Well put, R.T. A great thing about a great book is that there are always more than one, and often many, ways to interpret it.