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    The Great Gatsby
    The Great Gatsby
    The Great Gatsby
    Ebook214 pages2 hours

    The Great Gatsby

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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    The year is 1922, and young Nick Carraway moves to the village of West Egg, where he discovers that his neighbor is the eclectic millionaire Jay Gatsby. As he and Gatsby become acquainted, Nick is thrown into a world full of dazzling parties, unrequited love, and unchecked idealism. Gatsby, surrounded by riches, yearns for the love of a woman who chose another man. He waits for her every night, using a green light at the end of his dock to call out to her from across the water. Daisy, stuck in a loveless marriage, dreams of what could have been—and gets a taste for it after she is re-acquainted with Gatsby through Nick.Considered by critics to be one of the greatest novels ever written, this 1925 masterpiece is a portrait of the Roaring Twenties that’s full of literary intrigue, resounding metaphors, and decadent glimpses into the glitz and glam of early twentieth-century America. As relevant today as ever, it offers a cautionary tale of the American Dream, warning against the temptation to believe that enough money paired with equal desire can achieve anything—even reverse the deepest regrets.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media
    Release dateJan 1, 2021
    ISBN9781662090233
    Author

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term which he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he temporarily achieved popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald only received wide critical and popular acclaim after his death. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

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    Reviews for The Great Gatsby

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      When I first read this story, I viewed it as a tragic tale of star-crossed lovers. Poor Gatsby. Poor Daisy. Why couldn't they be together? Why couldn't Daisy have just stayed strong and admitted that she loved him? Coming to it now, in the span of years - well, just a few years longer than the span between Daisy and Gatsby's first and second meetings - now, it seems like a cautionary tale, one about how you can mess up your life when you are young, if you aren't careful, of how sometimes there are no good choices, and sometimes, if you haven't grown up, you make all the wrong decisions grasping after some ideal of what life is supposed to be.

      If you haven't read this yet, and you are reading it for pleasure, go away and read it. Don't read this, as it will be full of spoilers. Ok, you've been warned.

      When Daisy was 18, and a spoiled rich girl without plans, she met a young, poor officer, and fell in love. But being a rich girl, marrying a poor boy wasn't 'the thing to do', so he told her to wait - after the war, he would make his fortune and come back for her. But she didn't wait. This is where every reviewer I've read online finds fault with her. And I did too, when I was younger. I still hope I would've waited, in her place. But then I think, we're being too modern here, folks. Remember, women's lib came after Daisy. All the women she knew that she identified with - well, they had no marketable skills. They don't even take care of their own children. To deviate from the model she saw before her - dutiful, idle wife dressing up in pretty clothes - well, what would she have done instead? Daisy wasn't a brave girl. When she tried to be, the night before her wedding, she had her 'friend', Jordan, the voice of her place in society, of convention, around to tell her that it would never work out. To wait for Gatsby, while it might have seemed emotionally right, conventionally, it wasn't the right thing to do. She would've lost touch with her friends, her family...and what if he hadn't come back rich? Again, she had no marketable skills. What could she have done to help him? (Arguably, plenty - but not in Daisy's mind! She wasn't reading Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan - the women around her did certain things and the men did others. To think of breaking free from that pattern would not even have occurred to her!)

      So Daisy gets married and she hopes for the best. The best doesn't happen. Her husband cheats constantly. Except that he does seem fond of her, in a Don and Betty Draper way (you'll have to excuse me here - I never got beyond the second season of Mad Men - so little time, so many movies on Netflix.) . Life goes on. They meet with friends. They sit out in the garden and birdwatch. He buys her jewelry, takes her to Europe, etc. Life is in some kind of stasis.

      THEN - who should appear but her high school boyfriend! Ok, we don't know whether she went to high school, but lets think about this. She was 18 years old back then. Gatsby really was her first love. She did love him a lot back then. If he had asked her to marry him immediately, and not to wait, of course she would have. In her mind, only circumstances ever kept them apart. And now, here he is. Now that 8 years have passed, and she has a daughter and an unhappy marriage. But still, a marriage. What WOULD the right thing to do be here? What would you do, as a grown, married, adult, if your high school boyfriend showed up with the house of your dreams and a scrapbook full of photos of you, and promised to give you everything he couldn't the first time?

      This is where Daisy seems so young to me. Because for a moment, this looks like the right thing to do to her. She indulges it. She wants to escape from this more adult life she's been living. Forget the part about them being rich, callous and blase. That may be true. But also, it looks to me like a quarterlife crisis. She is married, and that's kind of rocky. She has a daughter that she's not quite sure what to do with. Can't they just dress up in their high school clothes and pretend to be 18 again? Because that's what she really appears to want to do. When Gatsby asks her to confront her husband, then it is forcefully brought home to her - they AREN'T kids anymore. She must feel some obligation to her family, at least to her daughter, if not to her husband - and then her husband reminds her of all the things they have been through together. Would you leave your husband for your high school boyfriend, at that point? I wouldn't. (Not that I would, in any case - sorry high school boyfriend - you were a nice guy! But it was a LONG time ago, and I kind of love my family - yes, even the big one with the moustache - thankfully NOTHING like Daisy's husband!)

      The book seems to present Myrtle, not just as a counterpart love story - Tom cheats, Daisy cheats, etc. - but as - well, what WOULD Daisy's life have been like if she had married Gatsby instead of Tom? Would he have been driven to make all the money? Or would she have become a Myrtle, trapped in poverty, but desperate to live in high society - hating her husband and her circumstances. I feel like, as a modern person, it's hard to have sympathy for Myrtle. You want to say, "Dude, poverty's not so bad. There's a lot of stuff I want right now, but it's not driving me to drink and run into the street or anything." But imagine, for a minute, that the women around you don't work. They don't teach you that you grow up and get a job. They teach you that if you are pretty, you will grow up and get married. Then, your husband will make the money, and you, if you have done everything right, will live this certain kind of life. Everyone you know lives this same kind of life. They go to parties. They fence on the lawn. They have tea. That's what they do. All of your friends do it. They don't work. If you were to go out and get a job - well, silly you - women don't have JOBS - well unless you're a nanny. Or a maid. But we don't associate with those guys. I would argue that, to a girl in Daisy's class in the 1920s, that's as if a modern woman were to say, "It's ok if we're poor. I'll just go work in a sweatshop." That's about the level of social prestige among her friends she would continue to have if she were going out to work. Daisy doesn't know anyone at all who is a family member or peer who works. To her, it just isn't done. In the same way that you or I, we don't say, it's ok if I can't buy my own clothes, I'll just spin them (and if you can do that, I am in total awe of you. But I can't!). It is something that is almost inconceivable to her. While she doesn't appear to have made up her mind to be totally conventional and satisfied with her life (like Jordan), she doesn't want to end up like Myrtle either. Not knowing an alternative, all she really knows how to do is 'go along to get along'.

      So, except for her bad driving and total disregard for hit and run accidents, I feel more sympathetic to Daisy this time around. She seems like she's just trying to do the right thing, and she hasn't yet figured out what the right thing is, and she sure doesn't have a good example around to follow, in any of her friends or, presumably, her parents, who pushed her into this life to start with and presumably live in much the same way. And Gatsby - well, I like him -- he's idealistic and sentimental, and honest (if you overlook the mob ties), and he certainly goes for what he wants...but he's kind of a creeper too, isn't he? Unhealthily attached to his teenage years.

      It was interesting, reading it again. What do you think? Was Gatsby and Daisy's love affair tragic, or just an unfortunate series of mistakes? What books have you read again that seemed completely different the second time around?
    • 5/5
      Great twist and critique of decay in the 1920's. I enjoyed the way in which the story was told as a series of flash backs to bring the significance of the events as they unfolded.
    • 4/5
      The Great Gatsby is like the Queen (the band, I mean, though Her Majesty might work just the same) of literature: they're both exceedingly overrated (hope I'm not ruffling too many feathers here, but I had to say it). That's not to say they're bad, per se, I just don't understand all the hype. Honestly, the only reason I think the Great Gatsby gets all the acclaim is because it was so American at the time, and so of course, the Yankees went wild (it's just a joke; please don't kill me). But I would never consider this novel the "Great American Novel" over the Grapes of Wrath, especially with lines like this:

      “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

      Help, I'm dying of hyperbole!
    • 4/5
      I remember reading this in high school, but I believe most of it went right over my head. It was far more interesting this time around! Fitzgerald really made the wealthy lifestyle sound appealing! And then he made it sound shallow and sad. But his writing is so poetic and articulate, really painting the picture for me, that I hung on every single word!
    • 2/5
      I read this when I was in high school because it was required, so I thought I'd give it another try.
      I know it's supposed to be the great American novel, but it didn't seem like it to me. Still didn't care for it.
    • 3/5
      "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." - Italo Calvino

    • 5/5
      I was forced to read this during school and I was very hesitant considering the fact that my teacher always picked horribly boring books on purpose, but this book was like no other. The green light on the dock being only one of many metaphors made me addicted and wanting to read more into the book. Nick as the main character gives you a wonderful insight into Gatsby's hard partying world and the wonderful Miss Daisy's confusing life. Everytime I read this book I find something new and interesting about it! Five stars!
    • 4/5
      Whew! This was one of the San Diego Public Library's read-alongs., and what a great choice! What good writing. Is this The Great American Novel? Is there such a thing? Anyhow, there's lots and lots to think about afterwards and that's the mark of a book worth reading.

      For some reason I apparently reported to GR that I read it a year ago, but I sure don't remember doing it. And the ending took me completely by surprise. Deleted the earlier reference.
    • 3/5
      Ridiculously over-rated.
    • 3/5
      Admittedly not a bad book, but oh! I just want to slap everyone upside the head - some repeatedly.
    • 4/5
      Summary: Great little book about a dreamer who doesn't give up.

      Things I liked:

      The writing is beautiful.
      The story is succinct and efficient.

      Things I thought could be improved:

      No idea. I enjoyed it from start to finish.

      Highlight:

      The first time Nick sees Gatsby almost made me cry it was so beautiful. I got chills.
    • 3/5
      Not very suspenseful.
    • 5/5
      Speechless..
    • 5/5
      An American masterpiece!
    • 1/5
      Depressing lit.
    • 5/5
      A great read.
    • 1/5
      Oh the drama!
    • 5/5
      Masterful.

    Book preview

    The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

    CHAPTER I.

    In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

    Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

    He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

    And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

    * * *

    My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

    I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, Why—ye-es with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

    The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

    It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

    How do you get to West Egg village? he asked helplessly.

    I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

    And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

    There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man. This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

    It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

    I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

    Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

    Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

    Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

    And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

    He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

    His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

    Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final, he seemed to say, just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are. We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

    We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

    I've got a nice place here, he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

    Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

    It belonged to Demaine the oil man. He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. We'll go inside.

    We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

    The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

    The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

    The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

    I'm p-paralyzed with happiness.

    She laughed again, as if she said something very witty,

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