The Great Gatsby was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1926. It was nothing like what I thought it'd be. I loved it. Grandeur, grandeur, grandeur of character. The characters are the most important aspect of a book, and Gatsby is a character I'd kill to have come up with.
Here we go~!! To quote Peter Pan. So The Great Gatsby is basically the love story between Gatsby and Daisy, which is rather corrupted, mirrored by other corrupted relationships, people, and the disillusion that chases all these characters as they watch their dreams fall short. Sounds enthralling, huh.
Now, for a whole load to read and pretend you read the book off of.
It starts off with the narrator, Nick Carraway, giving a half frame for the story. Explains that he's saying all this after he moved back home from the East. Foreshadow disaster! He goes about sort of edging himself into the topic of Gatsby through stories of his father and his advice, and moving into, 'Yeah....Gatsby, he was special.' See quotations. Then, the race is off!
So Nick came to New York to be a stock broker. So he's the nice mannerly hick fresh off the bus. The house he buys is a little thing on Wet Egg, this place by this lake. On the other side of the bay is East Egg, which is classier and richer. Gatsby lives in a massive beast of a mansion, if beasts twinkled and spouted music all through the night. Right across the bay from Gatsby lives who else but Daisy and her hubby Tom. (coincidence? I think NOT!)Daisy is Nick's second cousin once removed and Tom went to college with him, so he pops over for a visit.
There he meets Jordan Baker, pro-tennis player and consequentially, star. She has this way of walking about with her chin all proudly up as she strolls, that Fitzgerald keeps mentioning. We get the point. She's super cool. When Jordan mentions Gatsby since Nick lives next to him, Daisy's all 'Gatsby?...What Gatsby?' Shock! Then later in the conversation, as people keep moving in and out of the room, Jordan mentions that Tom's got some girl in New York, and everyone agrees that the world's in terrible bits. When Nick leaves, at night, he sees Gatsby outside stretching his arms out towards the green light shining at Daisy's house. This is a significant symbol, the green light, and I think expresses the strength and significance that symbols have of themselves.
Now, then the T.J. Eckleburg glasses are outed. They are an advertisement for eye doc Eckleburg. Again a strong symbol. Like the eyes of God, the reader, or maybe Fitzgerald. Sorta like the Allegory painting in Bleak House. Anyways, Nick, on another visit to the house, meets Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. Everybody knows the Mrs. W is cheating of her husband, except for of course. Then Tom and Mrs W get in a fight about Daisy and Tom breaks her nose.
Chap 3, Gatsby invites Nick to his party, and so Nick goes. And wadaya know? Jordan's there too. they're a bot weirded out by the amoral drunk people and find that most everyone is not invited but find it open. Jordan's then called in private by the one and only Gatsby. Then the car conversation between Nick and Jordan: Jordan isn't careful, but according to her, that's fine because other people are careful.
Chap 4: So rumours have been going about for a while concerning who Gatsby really is. Everyone thinks he's a somewhat shady character. We don't know much of him. Except that he calls everybody 'old sport' dawwwwww. Gatsby and Nick are supposed to have lunch together and Gatsby picks him up in his awesome car and explains to him some bits of his life. like he's from San Francisco, and his family all died and left him a bunch of money. He was educated in Oxford, which people are sceptical about, then tramped about Europe's capitals, and then he went to fight in the army. AT lunch we meet Mr. Wolfshiem, the sinister Jew, which for some reason, seems to be a patent character in a lot of books. He's a gambler. Rigged the world series, it seems, in 1919. Near the end of lunch, Nick sees Tom and is like Hey! Tom! Over here! and drags Gatsby along. He and Tom shake hands, and Gatsby's as rigid and awkward as a frozen pre-teen, and a second later, Nick turns to Gatsby and finds he'd disappeared. Ooooo. Now, Gatsby had said to Nick that Jordan'll fill him in on he rest of his elusive bio, and so Jordan does. She says that in 1917, when Daisy was 18, Jordan saw her with an officer, and they seemed to be in love. His name was Jay Gatsby, and he had to go overseas. When he left, Daisy stopped dating soldiers and got engaged to Tom. The day before the wedding, she got really drunk and said 'Daisy's change' her mind'. She married the next day and hadn't heard again of Jay until the What Gatsby? scene. Then Jordan spills the beans. Turns out Gatsby isn't the mysterious, eccentric, gambling, conspiring, I'd-rather-spend-my-life-looking-out-windows-in-a-silver-suit-but-I-philanthropically-throw-parties-for-the-psychological-pleasure-of-control person he seems to be, but a romantic, very polite, sap fretting over meeting his dreamgirl. Insecure, drama boy. Wow. Didn't see that coming. Yeah, he's been in love with Daisy for the five years they've been apart, and had got the house to be across from Daisy, looks at the green light to feel close to her, and has been throwing parties hoping she'd walk in. He asked Jordan to ask Nick if he could do the incredible, magnanimous, outrageous favour of having tea with Daisy and inviting him too. Nick's like, 'Uh...sure. That's all? Really?' and Gatsby's all, 'Well, I didn't want to be rude.' dawww. So they set it up, Jordan and Nick being all for Daisy-Gatsby since Tom's cheating on her anyways and Daisy's not all too happy with him. Honest Nick, ends he chapter by kissing Jordan.
Chap 5:Nick and Gatsby set the date for the tea to be the day after tomorrow. Gatsby goes about extremely kiddishly preparing frantically for the big date. There re very funny moments here where Gatsby reveals his inner, yellow, heart-speeding, jelly leg self. He cuts Nick's grass, for one, brings over a greenhouse of flowers, obsesses over lemon cakes and looks as though he'd swallowed a bucket of anxiety pills, standing nervously in his gold-silver-and-white suit. When Daisy shows up, it's super awkward and Gatsby is freaking out. Again somewhat funny. nick leaves them alone, and when he comes back, Daisy's in tears and Gatsby's glowing, they've reconciled their separation. Gatsby invites them to his house and here, the visitors marvel at the crazy grandeur of every room. There's a shirt throwing scene that's very weird. Eventually Nick leaves. He's like the third piece that makes the two work.
Chap 6: A look into Gatsby's past. He was originally James Gatz but changed it when he was 17, when he saw this guy, Dan Cody's, yacht and he decided to go out sailing. His parents were poor, unsuccessful farm people. He spent his time wandering on Lake Superior clam-digging and salmon-fishing to live. He got a lot of girls, so he grew contemptuous of them, and he always felt a burning, romantic ambition within him. When he saw Cody's yacht, Cody spoke to him, found the just-emerged Gatsby, liked him, and took him onto the ship to the West Indies. Cody left him a bunch of money, but Gatsby never got it, but now he had his name and a heart more sure of adventure. This Nick finds out way later but Fitz just decided to drop it in here. Well, Nick, after the tea thing, hangs out with Jordan for a few weeks until he drops in on a get-together at Gatsby's on a Sunday afternoon, including Tom. Gatsby invites them to party that night and they go but turns out Daisy's not all that into it. Nick stays late and generously listens to Jay's boyish insecurities. You start really getting a feeling that none of this is going to work out because, as Nick earlier observed, Gatsby's built up a crazy image of what perfection Daisy is in five years, and she won't be able to live up to it/ Jay goes on about the first time they kissed and it was his soul's end. He wants her to go to Tom and tell him she never loved him. Nick, in hearing all this, is reminded of something he wants to say, but can't, and doesn't. I don't really know what this means, honestly speaking. Sorry. Maybe something he experienced long ago that he has gotten over, but hat Gatsby has refused to.
Chap 7: Gatsby suddenly stopped having parties and everyone's confused. It's a very very hot day when Daisy has everyone over to her house. She's acting really weird, mean to Tom, close to Gatsby, and too talky. You get the scene when Daisy's all 'You always look so cool' to Gatsby and Tom starts wising up to their relationship. Daisy's then all, Let's go to town!! So, begrudgingly, Gatsby takes Tom's coupe with Daisy whilst Tom takes Gatsby's yellow car with Jordan and Nick. They stop by Wilson's for gas when they find out Wilson and his wife are moving west. Nick sees Mrs. Wilson glaring jealously at Jordan, whom she apparently thought was Tom's wife. Oh my goodness! Oh my stars! Holy Cannoli Tom's cheating on Daisy with Mrs. Wilson! Now, Nick keeps this to himself, and meanwhile, everyone's on edge with the heat and they end up in a suite at the Plaza Hotel after some weird suggestions. There the whole Daisy-Gatsby-Tom situation explodes.After Tom pokes at Gatsby a bit, Tom accuses Daisy of cheating, though more concerned with the fact that Gatsby's a nobody than the fact that she's cheating. Gatsby gets Daisy to say she never loved Tom and Jay's busy rubbing it in Tom's face that Daisy's leaving him and she loved Jay for five years, but then Daisy breaks and says she loved both of them, but only Jay now. Jay freaks out, insists on her leaving, and then Tom suddenly goes off revealing that Jay's a bootlegger, meaning he sells illegal liquor, since alcohol was illegal then. Daisy's freaking out, Jay's freaking out, and then they're all just goddamnit let's get out of here, so Jay and Daisy go out in Jay's car. Nick randomly remembers that it's his thirtieth birthday. But then things go wrong when Mrs. Wilson runs out to the car, probably wanting to talk to Tom, and gets killed in the crash. The pair pull a hit and run, and later on, Tom, Nick, and Jordan see the body and Tom's heartbroken. They hear of the yellow car and know it's Gatsby's, and Tom convinces the policemen that he's innocent because his car's blue. When he gets home, he sees Jay and Daisy together, Jay making sure that Tom doesn't hurt her. Jay reveals that Daisy was driving but he'll cover for her and take the blame. Gatsby hangs around the night staring at the house, but Nick saw that Daisy and Tom had reconciled, so there's nothing to watch for. darn.
Chap 8:Nick tells Gatsby to take some time off from the Daisy business, but Gatsby can't abandon her, so he stays. This is when Nick finds you all that stuff he already said about Gatsby, concerning Cody, and also that he found a huge class-wealth issue between him and Daisy in their original relationship. Then a servant comes in and mentions that Gatsby hasn't used the pool at all this summer. Nick tells Gatsby on his way out that he's better than all the rest of them put together, but in narration still says he disapproved of Gatsby all along until the end. Nick then breaks up with Jordan since he's sick of everybody in the east. He finds out that Wilson had been suspicious of his wife, and forced her to look out the window and let God look at her. Luckily enough, the glasses emerge from the fog. Then Nick ends up at Gatsby's house with Gatsby shot dead. Apparently Wilson went on a crazy vengeance trip and decided that his wife was running to her lover in the yellow car, and so tracked down Gatsby (partly helped by vindictive Tom) and shot him in the pool, and then himself. No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chap 9: So after all the legal stuffs done, Nick starts up with funeral plans, good guy that he is, but finds out that none of Gatsby's surprisingly few friends want to come to the funeral. Daisy and Tom have moved away and can't be contacted. A weird phone call comes too that tells Nick that jay, in fact, was doing some illegal stuff. Nick can't get Wolfshiem, and a ridiculous guy says he can't come but wants his shoes back that he forgot at Jay's house, and Nick hangs up on him. yay. It's really sad though. Turns out that though Gatsby threw all those parties for everyone, he only had Nick as a friend. But his dad, Jay's dad, luckily seems to care, and Nick delays the funeral for his arrival. The dad's really nice and tells Nick about Jay's childhood, since they lost contact. Jay as a kid was a super hard worker, very self-improving and put together, with lists, personal goals and morals. At the funeral, this guy with owl-eye glasses shows up and feels bad for jay too. Nick thinks about the west and thinks he and his friends, Daisy and all, were all actually westerners who just couldn't work it out with the east. He has this vision of a lady being carried to the wrong house, drunk on a stretcher, and no one cares. She's wearing white, which is a theme in the book, by the way. White is like an easterner pose for innocence when they're all wretched and sullied. He decides to go home. He meets up with Jordan first though, who accuses him of being dishonest and he says that being thirty, he's five years too old to be lying to himself. So he says the truth even if it's horrible, which is what a westerner must do when he goes to the east, I guess. Then he sees Tom and hates Tom for leading Wilson to Gatsby, but doesn't say Daisy was driving the car. Then he realises that Tom and Daisy are careless, like Jordan, and just screw things up. He ends up on Gatsby's lawn looking at the green light, thinking of dreams and how Gatsby, running towards his, was blind to the fact that his dream was already past and gone, and that the american dream is fled away in the East wind, gone and silent.
My response.
We all want the characters to have a happy ending, and we all want them to find something that we couldn’t; because you can’t be resentful of something that doesn’t exist - never existed. The beauty of fiction. Only a very adamant person in the practice of pettiness, could so bitterly envy the fictionalized sensation of human potential. And so many books have sad endings, that we love, not because they are like us after all in failing, but because they have that potential of happiness before it fades, as we do, and in those extraordinary moments, when the character fastidiously, but daringly, steps to the plate, and demands from jealous destiny the glory we seek in our own personal dreams, we applaud them, and see that in our futures as more real. A character must have a dream, find a dream, or lose a dream, but the dream is something that is singular to us; not dogs kicking in unconsciousness, but the waking dream that we drag out of our sleep as far as it will stretch before it lashes back in all ferocity, and snaps upon our whole selves, and thus you lose. Then you stretch again, and thus you find. And then you think it’s all pulled out and tethered into the real world, and then you are lost. Whichever, there is romance residing in the plot, and our lives mirror the characters in our privileged ways of being.
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry 'Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you! Thomas Parke D'Invilliers
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction - Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures. then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament' - it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which is not likely I shall ever find again. No - Gatsby turned out alright at the end; It was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. (1)
Read, folks. Read.
And now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again the most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man'. This isn't an epigram - life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. (1)
that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. (1)
I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything...Sophisticated - God, I'm sophisticated! (1)
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. (3)
Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, butt I seemed to bear an enchanted life. (4)
'How about the day after tomorrow?' He considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance: 'I want to get the grass cut,' he said. We both looked down at the grass - there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass, (5)
The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o'clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby's with innumerable receptacles to contain it. (5)
'Have you got everything you need in the shape of - of tea?' I took him into the pantry, where he looked a little reproachfully at the Finn. Together we scrutinised the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen shop. 'Will they do?' I asked. 'Of course, of course! They're fine!' and he added hollowly, '...old sport.' (5)
Gatsby, pale as death,, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes. (5)
'It's an old clock,' I told them idiotically. I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor. (5)
'You're acting like a little boy,' I said impatiently. 'Not only that, but you're rude.Daisy's sitting in there all alone.' He raised his hand t stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable reproach, and, opening the door cautiously, went back into the room. (5)
Americans, while willing, even willing, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry. (5)
Absolutely, old sport. (5)
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. (5)
The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. (6)
But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each nigh he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. (6)
a vague contour of jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man. (6)
Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty - the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. (7)
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. (7)
So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing. (7)
For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the 'Beale Street Blues' while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffles he shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose peals blown by the sad horns around the floor (8)
Just as Daisy's house has always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty. (8)
Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced the for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street. (8)
He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for hi. But it was all going by too fast ow for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever. (8)
'They're a rotten crowd,' I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.' I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd bee in ecstatic cahoots on that face all the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of colour against the white steps, and I though of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption - and he had stood on hose steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-bye. (8)
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass, A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (8)
Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on. (9)
West Egg, especially, still figures in my most fantastic dreams, I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely, the men turn in at a house - the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares. After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction. (9)
Gatsby's house was still empty when I left - the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. (9)
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity of wonder. and as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further...And one fine morning - So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (9)
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