The Great Gatsby

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

Product Description
Noted Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli draws upon years of research to present the Fitzgerald's Jazz Age romance exactly as he intended according to the original manuscript, revisions, and corrections--with explanatory notes. Reprint.

Book Description
This critical edition of The Great Gatsby draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, together with Fitzgerald's subsequent revisions to key passages to provide the first authoritative text of one of the classic works of the twentieth century.

I am not anti-kids or anti-teens. But high school students need constantly to remind themselves that they are not experienced readers, and that their opinions on books should be proffered with a necessary dose of humility--humility that they might not yet have learned to be a first rate reader.

To pass a judgment on THE GREAT GATSBY like "it isn't so great" or "this is a bad book" or "this is boring" says absolutely nothing about the novel but a great deal about the presumptuous oaf uttering the statement.

THE GREAT GATSBY--like ULYSSES, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, LOLITA, MOBY DICK, MIDDLEMARCH, or Proust--provides the measure of what a great novel can achieve. But one isn't born able to read and appreciate great books; it is a skill achieved over the course of time.

My advice to all the high schoolers who want to trash this book out of revenge for having been forced to read it: wait a few years, learn to read novels, gain a little more understanding of history, grow up a little, and then go back to it. The book will have remained the same, but you will have grown up sufficiently to get the point. Hopefully.


Read It Again For The First Time   March 15, 2001
Melvin Pena (Evanston, IL United States)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful

I haven't read Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' in almost two years. I picked it up again, to-day, though, and realized the truth of the notion that one learns something new each time one returns to a book. 'The Great Gatsby' just is a novel that must be returned to periodically to appreciate it properly.

While the characters in the novel remain ultimately unknowable at their indefinite cores, Fitzgerald does a great job tying his characters to their historical setting. The protagonist of the novel, to my mind, is Nick Carraway, the narrator. The hero of his story, which frames the novel, is the legendary Jay Gatsby - a legend in his own mind. Although Carraway's narration is often heavily biased and unreliable, what emerges are the stories of a set of aimless individuals, thrown together in the summer of 1922. Daisy Buchanan is the pin that holds the novel together - by various means, she ties Nick to Jordan Baker, Tom Buchanan to Jay Gatsby, and Gatsby to the Wilsons.

The novel itself deals with the shallow hypocrisies of fashionable New York society life in the early 1920's. It is almost as though Fitzgerald took the plot of Edith Wharton's 'The Age of Innocence' and updated it - in the process making the characters infinitely more detestable and depriving it of all hope. Extramarital affairs rage on with only the thinnest of veils to disguise them, the nouveau-riche rise on the back of scandal and corruption, and interpersonal relationships rarely signify anything permanent that doesn't reek of conspiracy. The novel's casual allusions to beginnings and histories often cause us to reflect on the novel's historical moment - when the American Dream and Benjamin Franklin's vision of the self-made man seem to coalesce in Jay Gatsby, a Franklinian who read too much Nietzsche.

No matter how you read it, 'The Great Gatsby' is worth re-reading. M.J. Bruccoli's short, but informative preface, and C. Scribner III's afterword are included in this edition, and both set excellent contexts, literary, personal, and historical, for this classic of American literature.


Best of Fitzgerald's Work   November 24, 2000
Matthew M. Yau (San Francisco, CA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

THE GREAT GATSBY superficially is the story of what happens to Nick Carraway, and the conclusions he draws from his experiences. Yet the very experiences of his own become the theme of the book. Nick, as a narrator, becomes significant in the thematic content.

Like many American novels in the same time period, THE GREAT GATSBY relies heavily on variety of symbols. A symbol may function on several levels at once. A symbol may represent an idea but also function as an idea throught the book.

One of the central idea that stands out and persists throughout the other novel is wealth. Fitzgerald's persoanl life has contributed a greal deal to this idea of wealth. In fact, his own life has more direct pertinence to his work than the lives of most writers. The idea of wealth ocuupies a great deal and achieves a central role in the novel, as well as Fitzgerald's life.

Nick Carraway is able to see the self-destructive nature of fascination of wealth. Maybe this is the message Fitzgerald wants to get across as he was deeply possessed by such fasination of materialism.