The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Review

I’m so glad to be doing this review today. Whenever I used to think of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I would always somewhat balk. After all, it was a “classic,” and sure to be a million pages. Thus, it was much to my amazement that it’s actually only 193 pages. Now I’ve read this great piece of American literature, and I’m ready to tell you all about.

I decided to review The Great Gatsby as part of Check Off Your Reading List Challenge 2014, where I made a commitment to read more of the classics. On all the “classics,” lists I saw on the internet, The Great Gatsby was the top book I hadn’t read. So I decided to read it first.

It’s kind of weird because most people read this book as part of a high school English class or something and hear a lot about different interpretations of the book. Besides chatting about it with a few of my friends, I haven’t heard of any special interpretations, so this is purely what I think of the book. Well, what’s better than a first impression?

Summary

The Great Gatsby is told in the first person from the point of view of a man named Nick Carraway, a nonjudgmental man who went to Yale and then decided to move out to the east (specifically Long Island) to work as a bond dealer. He lives across the street from a fabulously wealthy man named Jay Gatsby, but knows nothing about him.

We first start becoming acquainted with the story when Nick goes over to his cousin Daisy’s house. She is married to a rich man named Tom, and is an incredibly beautiful woman. We also meet their friend, Miss Jordan Baker. Although Daisy and Tom pretend to be happy together, Nick learns that Tom has been having an affair.

Over time, Nick starts trying to learn more about Gatsby. Gatsby always has big, fancy parties on Saturday nights that hundreds of people go to. Before too long, Nick gets an invitation and gets to talk with Gatsby, who invites him to hang out the next day. Nick assents, but also hears a lot of rumors about Gatsby.

Nick is also getting closer to Tom and meets his mistress, Myrtle. They want to have a life together, but are both already presently married.

Before long, Gatsby confides in Nick how he and Daisy used to be sweethearts and she made a mistake in marrying Tom while he was away at war. Gatsby arranges a meeting between him and Daisy in Nick’s house, and the same love is still present between them.

Eventually, everything comes to a head as Gatsby, Tom, and Jordan go over to Tom and Daisy’s house. We meet Daisy’s daughter, a girl mainly taken care of by a nurse and is not a big part of the story at all. It is an extremely hot day, and Daisy confides in Gatsby that she loves him.

All of them decide to go to a hotel. Tom eventually challenges Gatsby, who says that Daisy loves himself and not Tom. Tom says he discovered that Gatsby has been making his money by doing illegal bootlegging business, and Daisy says that although she loves Gatsby, she also loves Tom, or at least did once. Gatsby’s confrontation attempt failed. All the years of starting over at Daisy’s house and wishing for her to be his. All of it has failed.

After that, things go downhill quickly for everyone, including a couple of deaths. It is a very powerful story.

Review

The Great Gatsby is an emotion-based book, and is solely driven not on plot, not even on the characters, but on the emotions that the characters represent. For most of the book I didn’t really know what was going on or how it would connect, but it all did in the end. You have to patient to read the book, but you will be rewarded for doing so.

Parts of the book could definitely have been written more clearly, but that’s true with every book. Parts of the book stirred deep emotion inside of me, and I wished I could just sit by myself for hours and think about the book and the emotions they were bringing up. Maybe I’ll do that someday.

The most striking part of the book for me is the lesson on how powerful man’s imagination is. The statement, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart,” is very profound. At the end of the book it emphasizes how man in his mind makes great fantasies and how nothing will ever end a man’s faith that one day it will be realized. To think about all of the times I have done that, have almost worshipped ideas in my mind, well it shows me a lot about myself.

This very thing is what I love about writing. I feel that it allows me to express feelings that I can’t any other way. Every story has its own emotions in it, powerful emotions that have really been felt. And you can go into that world by reading them.

I also find it rather harrowing how no one ends up caring about Gatsby in the end. He helped out so many people and hundreds used to come to parties, but where were they all at the end? I don’t know how to feel about that, but I know I feel something. Fitzgerald does a good job of not telling us what to think or how to feel about the story, but instead just presents it to us. It’s probably good for most people around fifteen/sixteen and above. While the writing isn’t complex, the concepts are.

Would I recommend reading it? Definitely. It’s a great American classic for a reason. Because it deals with some deeper stuff in a rather undramatic way, I’m kind of surprised it’s as popular as it is. But I guess readers have felt the same way as I have after reading, their emotions expressed in this wondrous story. I hope you can feel the same.

Thank you for reading this review and if you’d like to purchase the book you can do so through this link. You can also like my Facebook page or subscribe through email below to hear about more awesome books.

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