The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

physical copy from the SMU library, finished 03/26/2024

In March of 2024, The Atlantic posted their list of “The Great American Novels” of the last century. They then demanded, “You have to read them.” This is my diary of doing just that.

page one with marginalia

I’ve read this book at least two times before, possibly three. In college, I was an English major, and it was assigned in two separate classes, I think, and it was probably assigned in high school as well.

The emphasis then, more than twenty years ago now, was on cynicism. I remember focusing on the barbs ( Jordan, at the end: “Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess”) and the shrewd observations (Gatsby, mid-way through: “Her voice is full of money”). As a middle-class person, reading this novel about rich people was just bizarre. These wealthy people day-drinking and living without consequence were such characters, couldn’t possibly be real. Then, I grew up.

My cynicism has shifted to sadness. I find Gatsby so sad because he is so full of hope and to live on hope is sometimes so sad. This line toward the beginning, which had never really registered with me before, affected me deeply. Nick says that Gatsby had “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely that I shall ever find again.”

Is it that our hope will destroy us?

Have so many undergraduates written a thesis-driven paper addressing this question? Oh, probably. But it wasn’t something that occurred to me in all of my previous encounters with this book. I thought that greed will destroy us, or that falseness will destroy us.

One last thing I’ll say that I found interesting about this re-read is that, even though the characters are all about thirty years-old, they are so weary (except for Gatsby and his “romantic readiness”). I’m not saying they aren’t allowed to be weary. I’m a teacher and often come across much younger people who seem sandbagged with weariness. I’m now in my forties, and have experienced so many subtle varieties of weariness and am just now realizing there’s a whole brilliant spectrum of weariness left to explore.

Books do help, though.

xosam