Review of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Available here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64317
https://www.wsfcs.k12.nc.us/cms/lib/NC01001395/Centricity/Domain/7935/Gatsby_PDF_FullText.pdf
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I read this back in high school, technically, but the only thing I remembered about it was that Jordan was a bad driver. So, I basically went into it as a fresh reader.
The book is told from Nick Carraway’s perspective. After the war he moved to ‘West Egg’, where he is Gatsby’s neighbor. His house, however, is a little place right next to Gatsby’s crazy mansion. Across from them, on ‘East Egg’, is where his cousin Daisy Buchanan lives with her husband, Tom.
Right in the first chapter we see that their marriage is an unhappy one. Tom is cheating on Daisy, and Daisy seems caught up in her own affairs and has no interest in talking about something like their child. Nick also meets Jordan Baker when he visits them, a professional golfer.
After that, Nick is invited to one of Gatsby’s overblown parties, where tons of people show up invited or not. Many of them seem to know nothing about Gatsby besides his name and rumors they heard. When Nick first meets Gatsby, it seems like Gatsby is putting on a big act, so it’s hard to really know who he is.
As the story carries on Tom is brazen about the affair he’s having with a married woman named Myrtle. He continuously promises her husband that he’s going to work out a deal on a car with him and figures he’s too stupid to understand what is happening. Tom goes as far as to insist that Nick meet Myrtle.
Nick spends more time with Gatsby and they seem to grow a liking for each other. Eventually, Gatsby asks Nick to invite Daisy over to Nick’s house. As it turns out, he only moved into the mansion so he could be across from Daisy. He’s a former lover of Daisy’s who lost her before because he was poor, and now that he finally has money – likely through illegal means – he wants back in her life.
Nick does invite Daisy over, and Gatsby is a nervous wreck about meeting her again after so many years. But they do meet, and their passion for each other is re-ignited, though there are hints immediately that Gatsby’s daydreams of her don’t line up with reality.
Now Tom is cheating with Myrtle and Daisy is cheating with Gatsby. Nick is enjoying his time with Jordan Baker, and the two seem to be caught up as witnesses to all these affairs.
Finally, on one hot day, they’re all tensely together and decide to drive into town. Daisy insists on riding with Gatsby instead of Tom, Nick and Jordan. Tom drives Gatsby’s car and they take his car. While they’re in the car with Tom they stop by Myrtle’s place, but her husband informs them that they’re moving away very soon. It becomes clear that he’s figured out that she’s cheating and he plans on running off with her. Myrtle sees Jordan in the car through the window and is jealously looking at her, believing her to be Tom’s wife.
Suddenly about to lose his mistress, and with his wife running around with another man, the pressure is on Tom now. The two groups meet up in a hotel and a confrontation happens. Gatsby insists that Daisy loves him and has only ever loved him. Tom states that isn’t true and that Daisy is just confused. The fight is causing Daisy to melt down, and she states that Gatsby is asking too much of her, and that she does love Tom.
Gatsby and Daisy end up driving off together, though unhappily and shaken after the fight. After, Nick, Jordan and Tom leave together. On the drive back they discover that Myrtle has been hit by a car – Gatsby’s car – and left for dead on the road. After Myrtle’s husband attempted to lock her in she ended up running out and, thinking that Tom and Jordan are the ones driving Gatsby’s car, she seemed to run to the road to try and speak to them but was hit and killed instantly instead.
Tom is furious when they discover it was a yellow car that hit her. He tells her husband, Wilson, something and ends up going home to Daisy, with Nick and Jordan.
All of the events are getting to Nick, and he ends up being cold to Jordan as well. Tom goes inside to check on Daisy. Gatsby turns out to be hiding in the bushes. He’s watching to make sure that Tom doesn’t do anything to Daisy, but when Nick goes to check on them it seems more like they’re conspiring with each other.
As it turns out, Daisy was driving the car. Though it’s likely an accident because a car was on the other side of the road and she ran out into the street, and Daisy panicked, if Tom finds out he’s worried that Tom will believe it was a purposeful act to kill his mistress. Gatsby has decided to take the blame for it.
In the end, Myrtle’s husband, Wilson, believes that it was Gatsby who killed his wife. Shortly after, when Gatsby is out swimming, Wilson stumbles into his yard and shoots him before killing himself. As a last request Gatsby asks Nick to make sure someone comes to his funeral.
Nick does his best to find people who will show, but Gatsby’s old business partners don’t want to get involved in the whole affair. The many hundreds of people who showed to his parties are suddenly gone. Daisy doesn’t answer. Over and over the people who were around Gatsby have other things to do. In the end three people show: Nick, Gatsby’s father, and a strange man who Nick bumped into at Gatsby’s party once.
Nick breaks up with Jordan and decides to return to the Midwest, disgusted with it all.
I think I can see why this story didn’t stick with me when I read it in high school. If you’re fifteen years old reading about a bunch of married thirty year olds, how well would you relate to it? They’re in a time of their life that a fifteen year old has never experienced and it would seem distant and unrelated to them.
It had me thinking a bit about assigned reading. It is a good book, but I think you get much more from it when you’re older than when you’re still a child. In a way I really hope that perhaps some high school students stumble upon this and give their perspective on the book. If you’re a teenager and reading this, I’d appreciate if you stopped, wrote out your own thoughts about the book and what you took from it and shared them. I’m curious what different things we would notice in our different stages of life and I’d love to hear your thoughts without them being tainted by my opinions.
That said, about the book: I think there are some things I took away from this because of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. If you haven’t read the short story, it’s essentially about post-partum depression, where the narrator is slowly losing her mind being kept in a room by herself to ‘rest and get better’ after she’s had a baby.
(The Yellow Wallpaper: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf
The reason that came to mind is the lack of something in the story: the child. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the mother should be spending time bonding with her child. Instead, we see her locked away and the child never even makes an appearance. The baby is this very distant thing.
In the very first chapter of The Great Gatsby, that came to mind, first. We know Tom and Daisy have a child. Yet, even when Nick presses, Daisy is more interested in her own things and her daughter falls to the wayside.
And again, throughout the story, I believe we see her daughter, Pammy, once. She’s trotted out like an accessory to show off and, despite knowing Daisy had a daughter, Gatsby seems almost surprised that she actually exists. Everyone is caught up in their own affairs and this kid is forgotten, pawned off on a nanny. Her relationship with her mother seems fleeting and superficial. I don’t think we even see her interact with her father.
This book, ultimately, is about chasing after non-existent fantasies. Gatsby was poor and was taken by Daisy when they first met. She was wealthy, wild, beautiful and “nice”. She was very popular and he liked that other men wanted her, too. Her life was the type of dream-life he wanted to have. From the beginning he’s putting her up on a pedestal.
That continues throughout the years until finally they meet again. But it’s obvious that even if they ran off together in the end it wouldn’t be a happy ending. The house and parties that Gatsby throws to imitate the lifestyle of the rich are shallow and meaningless. As soon as Daisy doesn’t like one he stops them. Daisy herself is not who he pictures her to be. She’s still beautiful and passionate, but there is no long-term relationship to be had there. He has an idea of Daisy in his head that she will never fulfill. Daisy is no less shallow than the rest, thinking nothing of her daughter as she plays around.
Gatsby is a fun fling for her. Outside looking in, we can all see it won’t end well. When Myrtle and Gatsby are both dead and gone, Tom and Daisy simply move on with their lives, leaving the disasters they created behind.
A poignant thing that stuck out to me at the end was Gatsby’s father. Of all the guests who came to his parties, just one showed up at his funeral with some appreciation for him, and Nick showed up, and his father came. Nick obviously cared for him, and his father loved him. Yet Gatsby spent his time chasing after people and a dream that tossed him to the side when he was inconvenient or not useful anymore.
He should have spent that time with the people who truly cared about him, because in the end the money mattered little. That’s the part that I think would be most relevant to a teenager. Very often young people become smitten and rebel against their parents, but the person they’re chasing after isn’t the fantasy that they think they are, and when it comes down to it their parents are the ones who will care about them in the end.
His father was not rich, but we see in the end how much he’s affected by his son’s death. It’s someone like his father, who truly loved him, that Gatsby should have been fostering relationships with, but we learn it’s been years.
And then with Nick, who stood by him, though he saw Gatsby’s foolishness for what it was. A useless endeavor.
Then, the oddball one, the Owl-Eyed man who pops up out of nowhere at the funeral. Sometimes it’s hard to know who will turn out to have a good heart. Yet who knows if Gatsby even knew this guy existed.
It’s a good lesson in being true to yourself and finding people who really care about you.
Next time I’ll be reading “Heidi” by Johanna Spyri. Here’s a link if you’d like to read along!
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20781
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