“The Great Gatsby” is a difficult novel that successfully polarizes readers, especially ones who take it seriously. That marks great literature. When serious readers react oppositely to the same work, you know you are looking at good, if not great, art. Please note, too, that the range of reviews today mirrors the range of reviews that greeted this book when it arrived new in bookstores over 80 years ago. You can easily search those then-current reviews on the Internet for your own amusement and instruction and once again be surprised over how little people change. For some of us, “The Great Gatsby” is a wonder, while it leaves others wondering at us.
To describe briefly the novel: Set in the American 1920s at the height of a stock market boom in the Roaring Twenties, this novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, a wealthy, young Ivy League graduate who’s learning the bond business on Wall Street. Nick tells us about his life at the time as it connects with a second cousin, Daisy Buchanan, from Louisville, who is married to the fabulously and formidably wealthy Tom Buchanan. Tom and Nick schooled together at Yale where Nick had an uneasy relationship with the larger, wealthier, and crueler Tom Buchanan. The story unfolds with Nick, Daisy, Tom, and an attractive female golf pro, Jordan Baker, out on the glistening lawns of the wealthy sections of Long Island. Fold in Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson and her clueless, but devoted husband, George, and we have a strong story, but nothing about this Gatsby guy. Only when we are well into the story do we hear about the title character, Jay Gatsby, and he is slowly brought into plot and character development. Gatsby has been driving this novel from the beginning, but we don’t know that. We learn in subtle, indirect fashion that Daisy and Gatsby have a mutual past that neither our narrator, Nick, nor her husband, Tom, discern or know. And in that past connection we grasp the proximate, animating force of the novel: Gatsby loved Daisy then and loves her now. The novel unfolds as Daisy learns that Gatsby owns a mansion across the bay from her estate. The old lovers cross paths again – one forcing the reunion, the other gliding into it – and we have all the action that will drive the remainder of the novel. I reveal nothing more and observe: The novel is simple and obvious, a story of wealthy, sophisticated people in boom times, with a narrator watching a married couple that has romantic rivals.
The basic plot and character in part explain why serious readers can be so seriously divided over “The Great Gatsby.” Virtually everyone who dislikes the novel finds it to be simplistic, boring, and obvious. Gee whiz, let’s try to get interested in people who have everything in life yet have trouble doing anything in life well. Tom and Daisy have it all, yet are stupid, shallow, and thoughtless people. Gatsby at least strives for something better and while he achieves great wealth, notoriety, and popularity, he, too, suffers from problems that should be easy to solve given his talents and resources. Jordan Baker, the female golf pro, is successful, famous, and attractive, but alas she can’t make her life work. And, Nick, our narrator, seems to observe everything well, except for himself. All in all, we have a cast of characters who warrant scorn, dismissal, and contempt.
And yet, other serious readers see Gatsby as a great novel, a work of art. How?
Start first with a quality that almost all serious readers notice and admire: The writing. Fitzgerald writes romantic sentences with a Hemingway edge. His words are at once beautiful and descriptive. Even readers who overall disparage the book, heed the writing, and marvel at it. The voice is unique, esthetic, and sharp. Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s finest writing and certainly some of the best writing in English anytime. But writing skill alone will not save this book for some serious readers.
What earns this disdain, I think, is found in the deceptive simplicity of the book. At a genuine level of analysis the story is rather easy to grasp, understand, and evaluate. Especially if you are reading this book under requirement as it appears many students experience, the psychological demands of the classroom (it’s required, a specific timeline, deadlines for completing various chapters, assignments in class or for homework on the book, etc.) I think lead many readers into the worst outcome for a reading class – you read to survive the course rather than for your own simple entertainment and education. Under these conditions, the obvious, simple, and designed elements of “The Great Gatsby” attract immediate attention in the short term demands of required reading and lead some readers to obvious, simple, and designed conclusions about the book. If you’ve “had” to read Gatsby, give it a year, and try once again. It’s not a maturity issue. It’s a motivation issue: Read it for yourself on your own terms.
If you read for yourself, you can reflect on complexities in the book. Realize first that Fitzgerald writes differently about Tom and Daisy than he does for Nick or Jordan Baker, or the minor, but important characters like Myrtle and George Wilson, but most especially for Gatsby. With Tom and Daisy, Fitzgerald tends to offer direct and immediate observations of their behavior and thoughts as if he is looking them right now with a God’s eye view and telling us about them. He really gets under the skin with Tom and Daisy. With Gatsby, by contrast, most of the writing is a narrative recounting of the past that is cloudy, perhaps misremembered, and operates as description with little interpretation or with contradiction from an unreliable narrator (Nick). This makes the characters of Tom and Daisy seem like high quality photos while Gatsby comes off more like a portrait done by an Impressionist painter: Clearly a portrait, but with shadows and no sharp edges. Tom and Daisy are objects. Gatsby is all subject and he becomes a Rorschach test allowing us to project ourselves onto him.
Next, you need to be alert to absolutely crucial plot actions that are briefly presented and can be easily missed. The climatic action of the story in particular requires the reader to do a lot of work and keep certain actions in mind through a long series of character reactions and developments. Recall the scene late in the book that takes place in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Who’s in the scene? What do they say to each other? How are relationship conflicts resolved? Then, the characters move rapidly out of the Plaza Hotel and drive back to West and East Egg in separate cars. How do those car rides manifest behaviorally the relationship conflicts resolved earlier in the Hotel? Stated another way, in the Hotel we hear conflict and resolution. From the car rides we see how that conflict and resolution play out in action. This sequence is the ultimate plot point for the novel that drives interpretation. You need to read it carefully.
Finally, you need to relate what we hear and see regarding relationship conflict and resolution with the interpretation and understanding of Jay Gatsby. You’ll recall that Tom and Daisy are bright, detailed, and sharp characters while Gatsby is vague, shadowed, and blurry. You can try to understand Gatsby through the events that occur following the car rides back to the Eggs. For you see, the whole point of the book is in what happens to Gatsby and what happens to Gatsby is caused by his character. (So, Fitzgerald exemplifies that maxim that all writers steal and that good writers steal from the best which in this case is Fitzgerald stealing from Heraclitus!)
For many people the basic theme of “The Great Gatsby” is this: Be careful what you wish for. I think at a simple level of analysis this is true. At a deeper level (one that follows my suggestions above) I would refine that theme into this: Be careful what you aspire to. For me, this novel is a great cautionary meditation on the American Dream and its less pleasant possibilities. In positive form, the American Dream is that you can be more than you started with. That explains in part why this book is often required for younger readers in high school or college who are taking their first real steps toward realizing their own American Dream. Fitzgerald offers Gatsby as a caution to those of us who think that aspiration past our beginnings is a good thing, a desirable thing, and the point of ambition. Everyone in this novel aspires to be more than they seem to be or who they are. Everyone in this novel suffers loss, failure, or disaster. No one in this novel leaves with any awareness of why they failed. Yet most of the characters can be described as either great challengers to the American Dream or else already living the American Dream. How is it possible for such failure to occur?
In my eyes, the answer is found in the last sentence of the novel: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Aspiration moves “against the current.” Ambition motivates us not to a positive manifestation of the Dream, with the Dream as the Vision or Goal of one’s life, but rather ambition motivates us to a negative manifestation of the Dream, with Dream as Fantasy or Psychosis or UnReality. And for those of us who aspire, we will find ourselves “borne back ceaselessly into the past” a modern Sisyphus doomed to push the stone uphill to the crest only to see it roll down to the valley every time.
That is a soul-chilling thought. Isn’t this kind of ambition a good thing? Don’t all good parents aspire for their children to aspire? Doesn’t it all fall down if we don’t aspire? It is not that anyone in the novel aspires badly or stupidly or illegally, but rather that they aspire at all is the root and branch of their failure. Here, “The Great Gatsby” argues that it is ambition itself that will cause people to fail and worse still to fail without insight and repair, for as long as you continue to aspire you will continue to fail.
This is an interesting and heuristic interpretation. First, it breaks free of the simple and obvious surface appearances and misdirections that divert some readers: It’s the 1920s and irrelevant; it’s about a bunch of spoiled white folks; it’s about the vita loca. Clearly, there’s a lot more going on here and it requires careful, thoughtful reading and reflection. Second, it explains why Gatsby is still appealing to so many people even after 80 years. It turns out that we are still living in a Modern age and the current Postmodern foolishness is explained by the past: Gatsby and Tom and Daisy and Nick would call themselves Postmodern today. The American Dream here is the defining element of Modernism and the fact that we’re still aspiring the same old way like Jay Gatsby connects with us at a deep level. Third, it reinforces the perceived greatness of the novel that many readers see and continue to see. This is not only a well written, well structured, pretty novel, it also addresses eternal human nature and the repetitive futility we often experience in life. Gatsby is dramatic philosophy, a better written Platonic dialog.
Or so I think today. I’ve been reading and rereading “The Great Gatsby” for 35 years and my perception of it changes like I’m rolling a diamond in bright light every new reading. I haven’t found many books that warrant or bear that kind of continuing examination.