Original Language: English
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
Genre: Literature/Poetry/Drama/Art
Classic: Ambition, love and betrayal in the 1920s
Country: United States
Publication Date: April 10, 1925
Format : kindle Edition
Page Count: 218
Reading Level: Young Adults
Deals with bootlegging. And explicit scenes/ language, more suitable for ages 13 and up.
Rating :4stars
Book Blurb
Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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 farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. --Amazon.com
My thought
Like much of Fitzgerald's prose, it is neat and well--crafted. Fitzgerald seems to have had a brilliant understanding of lives that are corrupted by greed and incredibly sad and unfulfilled. The novel is a product of its generation--with one of American literature's most powerful characters in the figure of Jay Gatsby, who is urbane and world-weary. Gatsby is really nothing more than a man desperate for love.
The novel's events are filtered through the consciousness of its narrator, Nick Carraway, a young Yale graduate, who is both a part of and separate from the world he describes. Upon moving to New York, he rents a house next door to the mansion of an eccentric millionaire (Jay Gatsby). Every Saturday, Gatsby throws a party at his mansion and all the great and the good of the young fashionable world come to marvel at his extravagance (as well as swap gossipy stories about their host who--it is suggested--has a murky past).
Despite his high-living, Gatsby is dissatisfied; and Nick finds out why. Long ago, Gatsby fell in love with a young girl, Daisy. Although she has always loved Gatsby, she is currently married to Tom Buchanan. Gatsby asks Nick to help him meet Daisy once more, and Nick finally agrees--arranging tea for Daisy at his house.
The two ex-lovers meet and soon rekindle their affair. Soon, Tom begins to suspect and challenges the two of them--also revealing something that the reader had already begun to suspect: that Gatsby's fortune was made through illegal gambling and bootlegging. Gatsby and Daisy drive back to New York. In the wake of the emotional confrontation, Daisy hits and kills a woman. Gatsby feels that his life would be nothing without Daisy, so he determines to take the blame.
George Wilson--who discovers that the car that killed his wife belongs to Gatsby--comes to Gatsby's house and shoots him. Nick arranges a funeral for his friend, and then decides to leave New York--saddened by the fatal events and disgusted by the easy way lived their lives.
It is A great classic set in the early 1920s. Fitzgerald is a wonderful writer. I immensely enjoyed the era, and characters. The end was rather sad to me. Just goes to show you cannot buy friendship.
i like this book. It is a great example of social class discrimination and how the upper class moves on to the next best thing when the new becomes old. A must read for everyone.
