A review by oofym
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is certainly applauded for a good reason, sometimes going into a widely regarded classic can be a bit of a letdown, perhaps the writing isn't as masterful as you expected, or the themes feel outdated; that's not the case with the Great Gatsby. I was honestly gobsmacked at how intricate and flowery the prose is throughout the novel, I expected Fitzgerald to be in the same realm as Hemmingway (who I find to be a very dull writer) but instead Fitzgerald is about as poetic as you can get without actually just writing poetry.

"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."

The themes of the novel are still relevant almost a century later. Some readers might interpret the book as being a critique on a particular time and place in America, a hammering against the supposed "American dream", but I find it to be much more universal than that, the novel plays on human tendencies that exist in any age and transpire in any place. Gatsby is your quintessential dreamer, as well as the time-frozen romantic. He longs for the mirage of a bygone love that has eluded him since his youth, through years of hopeless longing he has constructed the artificial image of a woman who has aged and changed while he's stayed the same. Eventually the characters and the reader come to the conclusion of a simple truth: that reality will never quite compare with what we can dream up in our heads. That's really the thing that stuck out to me here, the idolization all these characters have. Gatsby idolizes Daisy, Daisy Idolizes wealth, Tom idolizes prestige and ethnicity, Nick idolizes Gatsby. While the people who float around them seem to idolize the sheer intrigue and secrecy of what we suppose upper-class life to be.

"This unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a long island fishing village - appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."

All in all, the Great Gatsby deserves its place in amongst the other highly regarded novels of western literature.