That it may well be "The Great American Novel." I hadn't read Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' in almost two years. I picked it up again recently, though, and realized the truth of the notion that one learns something new each time one returns to a book. 'The Great Gatsby' is a novel that simply must be returned to periodically to appreciate it properly.
While the characters in the novel remain ultimately unknowable at their indefinite cores, Fitzgerald does a great job tying his characters to their historical setting. The protagonist of the novel, to my mind, is Nick Carraway, the narrator (he's the only one who CHANGES throughout the course of the novel). The hero of his story, which frames the novel, is the legendary Jay Gatsby - a legend in his own mind. Although Carraway's narration is often heavily biased and unreliable, what emerges are the stories of a set of aimless individuals, thrown together in the summer of 1922. Daisy Buchanan is the pin that holds the novel together - by various means, she ties Nick to Jordan Baker, Tom Buchanan to Jay Gatsby, and Gatsby to the Wilsons.
The novel itself deals with the shallow hypocrisies of fashionable New York society life in the early 1920's. It is almost as though Fitzgerald took the plot of Edith Wharton's 'The Age of Innocence' and updated it - in the process making the characters infinitely more detestable and depriving it of all hope. Extramarital affairs rage on with only the thinnest of veils to disguise them, the nouveau-riche rise on the back of scandal and corruption, and interpersonal relationships rarely signify anything permanent that doesn't reek of conspiracy. The novel's casual allusions to beginnings and histories often cause us to reflect on the novel's historical moment - when the American Dream and Benjamin Franklin's vision of the self-made man seem to coalesce in Jay Gatsby, a Franklinian who read too much Nietzsche.
I've not only read this book a number of times, I've taught it as well. It's an almost perfectly written novel.
2007-03-25 08:26:23
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answer #1
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answered by johnslat 7
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2016-11-23 14:55:42
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answer #2
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answered by Anonymous
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I read this book a few years ago...my sophomore year of college. Maybe it was in part to the amazing professor I had...but I really enjoyed this book. It was one of the few books I DIDN'T sell back at the end of the semester!
2007-03-25 08:17:23
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answer #3
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answered by Anonymous
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