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I've been thinking a lot about The Great Gatsby and some other classics lately. I've asked myself these questions: Do I care about the characters in Gatsby? Are the characters complex? Is there a deep philosophy as a theme of the book?

My answer to these questions is no. Maybe I'm just getting jaded. Any thoughts? And what does make a book great?

Randy

Randy Kadish wrote:I've been thinking a lot about The Great Gatsby and some other classics lately. I've asked myself these questions: Do I care about the characters in Gatsby? Are the characters complex? Is there a deep philosophy as a theme of the book?

My answer to these questions is no. Maybe I'm just getting jaded. Any thoughts? And what does make a book great?

Randy

Welcome, Randy.

What makes a book great, I think, is that it changes you. It makes you see things a little differently.

I read Gatsby for the first time just a few months back and what struck me about it is the amazing way Fitzgerald uses his narrator Nick Carroway to reveal events in an almost omniscient way. So it's first person omniscient which I think was fairly irregular for when this book was written. Gatsby is a pretty good book and the reason high school english teachers like to teach it is partly due to the fact that so much has been written about it. It's been thoroughly analyzed and plus it documents, albeit fictionally, a time period—the Jazz Age.

Gatsby is painted as an almost flat character, yet his story is undeniably tragic. Think about how he goes around saying "sport" all the time. No one knows him very well and he keeps his cards close to his chest, as it were. Only through the narrator, Carroway, can we get a glimpse of the depth of his character. And this is only one aspect of this book. There's a lot more than meets the eye in The Great Gatsby, but it's very understated. It's the kind of book that will benefit from multiple readings.

I'm pasting an excerpt from an article by David Jauss here that talks about Carroway as narrator . . .

The next example is from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, in which the first-person narrator, Nick Carroway, occasionally assumes an omniscient understanding of Gatsby.

One autumn night, five years before, they [Gatsby and Daisy] had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned to each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees-he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable vision to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Like the example from Crime and Punishment, this passage employs the language of the narrator, not of the character the narrator is discussing. Whereas Carroway's style is often lyrical and poetic, Gatsby's is nothing if not laconic. It's impossible to imagine him saying-much less thinking-"the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star." Clearly, Carroway is "translating" Gatsby's overwhelming, inchoate feelings into language that conveys what his own could not. Technically, then, these two passages employ the same point of view, though one is third person and the other is first person. Indeed, if we didn't know the excerpt from The Great Gatsby was narrated by one of the novel's characters, we would almost certainly assume that it was another example of conventional third-person omniscience. That fact alone should indicate that we should pay more attention to technique than to person.

Randy Kadish wrote:I've been thinking a lot about The Great Gatsby and some other classics lately. I've asked myself these questions: Do I care about the characters in Gatsby? Are the characters complex? Is there a deep philosophy as a theme of the book?

My answer to these questions is no. Maybe I'm just getting jaded. Any thoughts? And what does make a book great?

Randy

I agree with Geo that this is a great book, deserves its status as a candidate for the Great American Novel. I haven't reread it for a long time, but I think that perhaps few other books repay study of both technique, as Geo mentioned, and theme the way "Gatsby" does. No, the characters, with the exception of Nick Carroway, are not deep or particualrly likable, but Fitzgerald pointedly did not make them so. Gatsby is pictured as an American archetype more than as an individual. He is the self-made man in an almost literal sense, the culmination of the American promise--although that promise is largely empty in Fitzgerald's eyes. The novel casts a spell for me; it is not truly realistic, but has its almost other-worldly qualities. I'm thinking especially of the landscape of East Egg.

Hey, why don't we put up The Great Gatsby as a BT fiction selection?

Randy Kadish wrote:I've been thinking a lot about The Great Gatsby and some other classics lately. I've asked myself these questions: Do I care about the characters in Gatsby? Are the characters complex? Is there a deep philosophy as a theme of the book?

My answer to these questions is no. Maybe I'm just getting jaded. Any thoughts? And what does make a book great?

Randy

I haven't read Gatsby for years, but I have to agree with the others that it is and should remain a classic. The characters may be archetypes, but the way that they interact becomes complex. I think Daisy's conundrum, in particular, shows complexity. She tries to grow as a character, but she can't rise above herself. Also, I think that the theme of the loss of innocence is a deep philosophy. It is something that echoes through the great works throughout the world.

As for what makes a book great.... I think that there are two ... aspects. First of all, a great book, for me, is one that you can read again and again and always have the hope that it will end differently because it was that well written. The second aspect was the one that geo mentioned - that it changes your perspective, even if only in a minor fashion.

Good points, I must say. I certainly think Gatsby is a good book.
Randy

Oddly enough I just went back and read Gatsby last week. It was the first time in something like 15, 16 years that I read it. It really is not only the great American novel of the 20s but it holds a timeless quality that makes it relevant today.
You have this great Greek like tragedy love and death that leaves everyone unfulfilled in the end (Fitzgerald's summary of the 20s)....the death of the American dream

Great Gatsby's a decent book. I'm sure if I reread it, I'll like it again, but my english 11 class had to read it, and the teacher was new... It was pretty bad, it took us over a quarter to finish the book, because we had to reread everything over and over, and people kept getting confused, even though the book's not that difficult and it was a college prep class. /rant



But I can't say it had an impact on me.