THE GREAT GATSBY

THE GREAT GATSBY
GENRE : SATIRE, TRAGEDY, BIOGRAPHICAL FICTION
F. SCOTT. FITZGERALD
FIRST PUBLISHED : 1925

"This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."

The Great Gatsby, The Great American Novel, is F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist novel about jazz-age America. The novel tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth, which ultimately led to his own destruction. It's highly unreliable protagonist is Nick Carraway, who recounts his story of the two years he spent with Gatsby.

Almost 90 years later after its publish, The Great Gatsby is regularly named one of the greatest novels ever written in English, and has annually sold millions of copies globally. This slim novel, a story of visions and gaudy revels, of violence and constant envy, shimmers with a magic that readers have long recognised. It has been adapted as movies, ballads, literature, theatre, opera, radio and so on.

It is a story of ellipsis: to understand it well, we must learn to read between the lines, as Gatsby fails to do. And this is precisely what attracts me to this classic novel each time I think about it.  The gilded, art deco opera of Fitzgerald's language is extremely risky, always in danger of becoming as ostentatious as Gatsby's pink suit. This novel is a celebration of intemperance, and a condemnation of its destructiveness. It is about trying to recapture our fleeting joys, about the fugitive nature of delight. It is a tribute to possibility, and a lament about disappointment. It is a book in which the glory of imagination smacks into the grimness of real life.

Through Gatsby, Fitzgerald very cleverly holds a mirror and shows us the reality of our lives. Gatsby learns the hard way that being found out is inevitable, escape from his past impossible; but Nick beats a retreat back home, escaping back into his own nostalgic past. Gatsby is a fable about betrayal – of others, and of our own ideals. The concept that a New World in America is even possible, that it won't simply reproduce the follies and vices of the Old World, is already an illusion, a paradise lost before it has even been conceived. By the time Gatsby tries to force that world to fulfil its promise, the dream is long gone. But that doesn't stop him from chasing "the green light", the dangled promise of power and a deep longing for Daisy.

"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay.. You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock."

In the unforgettable closing passage of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald makes it clear that if his story is about America, it is also a universal tale of human aspiration. My personal favourite, it summaries the entire plot pretty neatly, and leaves the reader to ponder. 

"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."

The idea that America panders to our fantasies is the precise opposite of the American dream. We are forever chasing the green light, a false promise of self-empowerment in which we are desperate to believe. And yet although it is a lie, we can't survive without it, for we always need something commensurate to our capacity for wonder, even if it compels us into a contemplation we neither understand nor desire.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."