Description:

Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky business interests and a shadowy past. As the two men strike up an unlikely friendship, details of Gatsby's impossible love for a married woman emerge, until events spiral into tragedy.

Regarded as Fitzgerald's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of American literature, The Great Gatsby is a vivid chronicle of the excesses and decadence of the "Jazz Age", as well as a timeless, cautionary critique of the American dream.

Review

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby ends with one of the most famous sentences in American literature, an image of human striving as an endless rowing against a current that carries us backward. Yet the sentence is not about Gatsby alone—it speaks in the first-person plural, and it arrives after Nick Carraway has widened his lens from a single man’s ruined hope to the first Dutch sailors’ sight of a continent. That widening is the novel’s essential gesture, and it contains the tension that makes the book durable: Gatsby is simultaneously a ferocious indictment of a specific social world in 1922 and an elegy for a national myth it suspects was always an illusion. The argument I want to defend is that the novel’s deepest feat is not its plot or its style in isolation, but the way it declines to resolve the contradiction between its admiration for Gatsby’s “romantic readiness” and its clear-eyed exposure of what that readiness is willing to ignore, commodify, and destroy. The book holds these two judgments in suspension, and the strain is what gives it force.

Nick Carraway opens his account with a piece of paternal advice—“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had”—and announces himself a tolerant observer who reserves all judgments. By the final chapter he has passed devastating judgment on the Buchanans, broken off a romance with Jordan Baker, and declared himself one of the few honest people he has known. This gap between the posture of neutrality and the reality of condemnation is not a flaw; it is the book’s true subject. Nick is an implicated witness. He arranges the reunion that reignites Gatsby’s obsession, withholds the truth about who was driving the car that killed Myrtle Wilson, and throughout the novel serves as the enabler and the elegist of a man whose fortune is built on criminal enterprise. The question the book keeps asking is whether honest assessment is possible from inside the corruption it describes, and it never settles the matter cleanly—not even for Nick himself, who can pronounce Tom and Daisy “careless people” and still admit that Gatsby, whom he “scorned,” was somehow “worth the whole damn bunch.”

The premise that drives the engine is famously simple: a self-made millionaire, Jay Gatsby, has organized his entire existence around the recovery of a woman he lost five years earlier, and he enlists his next-door neighbor to help him stage a reunion. But Fitzgerald threads through that romantic plot a corrosive class argument. Gatsby is not merely a lover trying to reverse time; he is James Gatz of North Dakota, a boy who wrote a Franklinesque self-improvement schedule in the back of a copy of Hopalong Cassidy and who reinvented himself wholesale at seventeen when Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor off Lake Superior. Nick calls him “a Platonic conception of himself,” and the phrase is exact: Gatsby has substituted an idea for a person, and he wants Daisy to conform to the idea by declaring she never loved Tom Buchanan. The famous reunion chapter pivots on this substitution. When Daisy weeps into a pile of gorgeous shirts, she is not weeping over the shirts but over something the shirts represent, something she cannot articulate except to say, “They’re such beautiful shirts, it makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” Gatsby’s “count of enchanted objects had diminished by one,” Nick notes, a deadpan line that short-circuits the Romantic sublime with the logic of a transaction: the enchanted object lost its charge the moment it became available. The green light across the bay, which early in the novel Gatsby reaches toward with trembling arms, is demoted during the reunion to merely “a green light on a dock.” The novel’s argument about desire is pitiless: it feeds on distance and dies on attainment.

Fitzgerald builds the moral landscape as a physical one. West Egg, where Nick and Gatsby live, houses new money, its residents gauche and uncredentialed. East Egg, across the water, is the precinct of old money, whose inhabitants—Tom and Daisy Buchanan—have never had to earn either their wealth or their status. Between them and New York City lies the Valley of Ashes, a desolate industrial dumping ground “where ashes grow like wheat” and “ash-grey men” crumble through the air, presided over by the enormous bespectacled eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, a defunct oculist’s billboard. The geography is schematic, but the schematic is the point: the glamour on which East Egg and West Egg both depend has a cost, and the cost is ground into a grey wasteland where George Wilson runs a failing garage and Myrtle Wilson attempts to escape her marriage through an affair with Tom. The asymmetries of consequence are mapped onto this terrain with unforgiving clarity. When Myrtle is struck and killed by the speeding car Daisy is driving—Gatsby’s car, though Gatsby will take the blame—the chain of death that follows is the novel’s verdict on who pays and who does not. George Wilson shoots Gatsby, then himself. Tom and Daisy, after a quiet reconciliation at their kitchen table over cold chicken and ale, retreat “back into their money or their vast carelessness,” leaving Nick to arrange the funeral nearly alone. The phrase “vast carelessness” names the moral category that matters most to Fitzgerald: a condition in which wealth grants immunity from the wreckage one causes, and the absence of consequence is the truest index of power.

The scene that cracks the dream open is the afternoon in the Plaza Hotel, on the hottest day of the summer. Tom, having investigated Gatsby’s past, confronts him in a rented suite and demands that Daisy say she never loved him. Daisy, pressed between the two men, equivocates: “I did love him once—but I loved you too.” For Gatsby, this admission is annihilation. He had built his whole identity on the belief that the past could be erased, that Daisy’s love for Tom was a temporary mistake, that five years could be annulled by sheer force of will. “Can’t repeat the past?” he had asked Nick, incredulous. “Why of course you can!” But the past resists. Tom’s exposure of Gatsby as a bootlegger and a gambler is almost secondary; the deeper wound is that Daisy, a flesh-and-blood woman with her own compromises, cannot perform the role of the Platonic ideal. Nick later describes how Gatsby, after the Plaza, told him the whole story of his youth with Dan Cody “because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out.” That image of an identity shattering like glass is the book’s most precise anatomy of what happens when a self-authored life collides with the unyielding fact of inherited class. Gatsby became rich, but he never became Tom, and Tom’s wealth—effortless, brutal, and secure—needs no reinvention.

I want to pause over a sentence that has not received the attention it deserves, one of the most compressed philosophical statements in the novel. In the aftermath of the Plaza, when Nick observes George Wilson reeling from the discovery that his wife has a life outside him, he writes: “I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before—and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.” The line refuses the categories Tom’s racism has spent the novel peddling—Tom has been waving around a book called The Rise of the Coloured Empires by “this man Goddard” and worrying about “Nordic” supremacy—and replaces them with a division that cuts across class and station: those who are suffering the consequences of the catastrophe, and those who are insulated from them. Wilson is sick; Tom is well. Gatsby will be dead within hours; Tom will live on, unscathed. This tiny caesura in the narration does a great deal of moral work, quietly undoing the pseudo-scientific hierarchy Tom espouses and substituting the real inequity that the book has been tracing all along.

Gatsby’s corpse floats in the swimming pool, the autumn leaves drifting onto the water, and no one comes. The party guests who drank his champagne and spread lurid rumors about his past evaporate. Meyer Wolfshiem, the gambler who claims to have “made” Gatsby and who fixed the 1919 World Series, sends a terse letter of regret. Klipspringer, the self-described “boarder,” calls not to pay respects but to ask that his tennis shoes be forwarded. The emptiness of the funeral is the novel’s final sociological exhibit, proof that the entire apparatus of Gatsby’s hospitality—the orchestra playing Vladimir Tostoff’s “Jazz History of the World,” the crates of oranges squeezed by butlers’ hands, the hundreds of uninvited revelers—was an illusion of community with no reciprocal claim. Only Nick, Gatsby’s father Henry C. Gatz, and the owl-eyed man who once marveled that the library pages were real attend. Mr. Gatz produces the dog-eared Hopalong Cassidy with the boy’s daily schedule, a residue of the earnest self-improver Gatsby had been before he became a criminal, and the pathos of that schedule—the time set aside for “dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling,” for studying “electricity”—cuts against the glamour of the parties with a devastating specificity.

Then comes the ending, which not everyone remembers accurately. Before the famous final sentence, Nick imagines the Dutch sailors’ first sight of the island: a “fresh, green breast of the new world” that offered a moment of pure enchantment, a continent commensurate with human wonder. This is the original American dream, and Gatsby’s error was not that he failed to inhabit it but that he tried to—that he believed the promise was still operative and could be realized in the person of Daisy Buchanan. The concluding meditation pulls back from the specific wreckage and speaks in the first-person plural: “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 further… So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The shift from “he” to “we” is a move of immense narrative audacity: Nick, who has spent two hundred pages cataloguing the moral failings of everyone around him, here includes himself—and by extension the reader—in the indictment and the elegy. The green light is no longer just Gatsby’s private talisman; it is every human hope that recedes as we pursue it, and the boat against the current is the shared condition of wanting a future that the past will not release.

The novel is a piece of literary modernism that assembles itself through motif, symbol, and reticulated imagery rather than through straight chronology. Fitzgerald withholds Gatsby’s face until well into the first third of the book, releases the truth about his past in staggered revelations through Jordan’s narration and Gatsby’s own confession, and employs weather as a near-mythological register: rain breaking into sun at the reunion, the “broiling” heat of the fatal day, the first autumn chill on the morning of the shooting. The unreliable, retrospective narration belongs to the tradition that was remaking the novel in the wake of the First World War, when the confidence of the Victorian omniscient voice had collapsed. Yet the book also belongs to another lineage: it is a materialist critique of conspicuous consumption that would feel comfortable in the company of Veblenesque sociology. The distinction between West Egg and East Egg, the endless inventory of shirts and motorcars and party guests, the brutal clarity with which money dissolves into carelessness—these are arguments about class that a novelist of manners might have made without the modernist apparatus, but Fitzgerald’s achievement is to fuse the two modes, so that the symbolic landscape does the sociological work and the sociology becomes metaphor.

The Platonic idealism that Nick invokes explicitly is a third tradition that runs through the book, and it is also the source of its most uncomfortable insight. Gatsby’s dream is magnificent because it is impossible; his “capacity for wonder,” as Nick calls it, is a thing the novel admires genuinely, and the prose around Gatsby often feels like an act of worship. But the object onto which that wonder fixes is, in Nick’s own word, “meretricious.” Daisy’s voice “is full of money,” Gatsby tells Nick, and the remark is not a compliment; it is a recognition that the ideal is already compromised by the very thing Gatsby has had to acquire to pursue it. The book never resolves whether his hope is heroic or pathological, and the closing cadence, by refusing to answer, preserves the mystery that a lesser novel would have dispelled. This is the point at which the American jeremiad—the lament for a corrupted national promise—intersects with a more private Romantic tragedy, and the intersection is where the book lives.

That said, the novel’s tight construction exacts a cost of its own. The female characters are drawn with a thinness that can feel instrumental rather than observed. Daisy is the voice full of money and the beautiful little fool, but she is rarely permitted an interior life that is not refracted through the men who desire or possess her. Jordan Baker, the professional golfer with the scandal of a tournament cheating incident behind her, is alluringly cool and then discarded when Nick decides he has had enough of the East. Myrtle Wilson is vivid in her desperate vitality—the scene in her apartment, with the Versailles tapestry furniture and the copy of Simon Called Peter and the gossip of her sister Catherine, is one of the novel’s sharpest set pieces—but her function is finally to be a body on the road. Fitzgerald’s moral geography, for all its power, can tip into the schematic: the Valley of Ashes is so clearly the price of the Eggs that the symbolism can feel like a diagram rather than a world. And Nick’s self-proclaimed honesty, upon which the whole act of narration depends, remains a live wire that the novel declines to test as rigorously as it might. He tells us he is honest; we see him lie. He judges the Buchanans for their carelessness while having facilitated Gatsby’s affair and having driven away from the scene of the accident without telling the truth. The novel needs Nick to be better than his surroundings, but the evidence for his superiority is largely his own word.

These are not failures of craft; they are the inherent tensions of a book that compresses a vast social critique and a metaphysical elegy into fewer than fifty thousand words. The compression is the book’s genius, and the places where the seams show are where the ambition strains against the form. I do not think anyone who reads The Great Gatsby closely will find it a cheering experience. It is beautiful in the way a stained-glass window is beautiful: light passes through, but what it depicts is a world of wreckage. The people who should read it are those who have been told that the American Dream is a ladder anyone can climb, and who are willing to sit with the counter-proposition that the ladder may lead nowhere except to a swimming pool in the autumn, with a dead man floating face down and a telephone ringing in an empty house. The final image—the boats beating on, borne back ceaselessly into the past—has entered the culture so thoroughly that it is easy to forget it was once a sentence that no one had ever read before. To encounter it in its proper sequence, after the funeral and the Dutch sailors and the dark fields of the republic rolling on under the night, is to feel a novel tighten its grip all at once and for good.