If there are
books I would love to read over and over again, The Great Gatsby must be one of
them. This was my second read and I gained much more than my first one, and I
have a feeling I would still find more in the future reads. Reading The Great Gatsby is really like peeling an
onion, you must peel layer by layer to get what is inside. This book is full of
metaphors, and Fitzgerald does not always reveal everything straight forward;
he likes to speak his ideas in broken sentences, challenging the readers to
catch the hidden meanings. And that is why this book provides never-ending
debates and discussions, which make me love it more.
As I have
done
many chapter posts and tasks for WEM, I won’t waste time by writing
what Gatsby is about. In short, it’s about Gatsby’s false dream—how a poor man
fights persistently to win his dream lover, becomes wealthy by disrespectable
businesses and ready to snatch the woman from his husband; but after an
accident that has killed a woman, he finds that she is only an empty idea, and
that lavish prosperity in the end only leaves traces of moral corruption [taken
from
my first level inquiry post].
I have also
peeled many aspect of the story in my
three levels inquiries, that I
have almost nothing left now to make a decent review (LOL). But instead, I have
challenged myself earlier to ask one important question, which I also invited
others with whom I read this along to answer.
Do you think Gatsby is
really ‘Great’? If yes, why? If no, why did Fitzgerald put it in the title?
--My answer--
First I must
think about the criteria of ‘Great’; what do people usually mean when they say
that someone is great? Success would be the answer. Great people are they who
succeed in their fields. Now let’s apply this to Gatsby—does he succeed? A big
no; he worked hard to reach his dream, not knowing that it has vanished. It’s
not only failure; I can say he’s pathetic. So Gatsby must be far away from
being great—although in a way, I admire his discipline, focus, and persistency
to reach his dream. If we want to label him as ‘Great’, he is certainly great
in accomplishing a personal target. Nonetheless, he is failed in the end; and
one’s greatness is always defined by the result, right? Yeah, we are
result-based generation. I can talk about this forever, but for now, let’s get
to the second part of the question.
If Gatsby is
not great, why is the book given The Great Gatsby as its title? What did
Fitzgerald want to say to us? It came to me that maybe Fitzgerald wanted to
emphasize that our way of defining
greatness has been wrong. Maybe one’s greatness should not be valued only
from the visible quality of success; it is merely the outer aspect of men; our
old concept of success. I think Fitzgerald wanted us to look deeper into the
inside of humanity. From the beginning Nick has been writing about morality: “A sense of the fundamental decencies is
parceled out unequally at birth.” –(Chapter 1); so it makes sense that that
is what Fitzgerald wanted to say to us through The Great Gatsby: morality. Morality is far more
important than physical achievement.
American
first dream was about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness
[from Sparknotes]. However, the rise of stock market post-war had created a
sudden euphoria, where people started to spend and consume at unprecedented
levels. With that, unfortunately, morality started also to decay and corrupted.
In Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald wanted to show two different things.
First, the empty pursuit of dream; in Gatsby,
American people should see that their first original dream had been vanished,
and replaced by the moral corruption (Daisy is no longer the fresh-innocent
girl Gatsby used to know, she had been…you know what). Second, the good morality; although Gatsby
gained his wealth in disrespectable ways, he still have pure conscience in him
(he stood up to take the blame of Myrtle Wilson’s murder although he did not do
it). Between the two, while the empty pursuit of dream won’t make one great, I
believe the good morality will.
At the end I
think, Fitzgerald wanted to say that it is great of Gatsby to do what he did at
the end of the story. It is also what has made Nick complimenting him: “They’re a rotten crowd; you’re worth the
whole damn bunch put together”.
But most of
all, I think, The Great Gatsby itself is a great literary work by Fitzgerald;
maybe not the greatest one, but obviously one of the greatest… ;)
Five whole stars
for The Great Gatsby, a novel I will certainly read and read again in the
future.
~~~~~~~
I read the Penguin Classics hardback edition
This book is counted
for:
