The Great Gatsby

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

It’s hailed as an American literary classic, an incredible depiction of the ‘Jazz Age’, and has been immortalised (more than once) in film. Clearly F. Scott Fitzgerald knew what he was doing when he wrote The Great Gatsby.

Written as the reminiscences of Gatsby’s neighbor Nick Carraway, the book chronicles the relationship between Carraway and his charismatic neighbor over the course of a single summer. Everyone is awed and intrigued by Jay Gatsby. His Long Island mansion is filled every Saturday night with glittering and glamorous partygoers, jazz, and champagne, yet hardly anyone knows the host. During the course of the summer Nick discovers that Gatsby’s lavish lifestyle is merely an outfit to impress a long lost love, Daisy who lives across the lake and is married to millionaire Tom Buchanan.

Despite being such a short novel –sitting at a mere hundred and seventy pages long- The Great Gatsby could very well be one of the most rich and complex stories in American literature. Fitzgerald depicts a glamorous world coloured by jazz, champagne, sequins, and wealth while simultaneously showing readers a diseased and decaying world beneath. The book has famously become synonymous with the American Dream whilst also warning everyone that dreams have the potential to become complete nightmares –a theme that has been continuously explored in American cinema e.g. American Beauty.

Gatsby’s character is not the archetypal guy next door. He’s one of the most enigmatic characters in literature: a towering figure that everyone knows yet no one cares to remember. Throughout the story hundreds of people flock to his parties and then proceed to question and gossip about the nature of their mysterious host. Amidst the predictable rumblings of ill-gotten wealth, bootlegging, and such are sinister theories of murder and espionage and by the time we reach the last page we are still wondering ‘who is Jay Gatsby?’

Image credit: Mental Floss

Alongside the violently sparkling imagery of a bygone era that continues to enthrall modern readers, Fitzgerald’s prose is tight and clean and occasionally flavoured with poetic musings during the narrator’s more pensive moments.

But of course, underlying the glamour, bawdiness, and risqué is a truly melancholic tale about identity, materialism, and the never-ending quest to aspire to something. It’s a world where everyone has two faces: one that is pretty and smiling and worn to warm the world outside while the other hides away in shadow and mourns the current state of affairs. Happiness is an elusive promise in this book and while the mind’s eye is stimulated with dreamlike sequences of parties and jazz, the spirit does suffer from an acute sense of futility and despair, making it a most compelling yet deflating reading experience.

The Great Gatsby was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and first published in 1925 by C. Scribner’s Sons in New York.