[QUOTE]Originally posted by Dread Pirate Crunchy:
Nothing happens for most of the book and the characters are unlikable. The themes, as best as I can tell, are the earth-shaking newsflashes that rich people are shallow and you shouldn't live in the past.
One of the main reasons i like literature (using the phrase with trepidation - i don't subscribe to ideas of high and low culture) is that it's a barometer of current culture and ideas. gatsby reflects the deconstruction of the 'american dream' myth that was going on at the time, which genuinely affected the mood of the nation, it's not just some high - falutin' pointlessness. The cultural climate at the time was full - on Modernist, "we are pushing ahead, forging the bright new future", combined with "aaargh! the world is moving so fast, how can we keep up, what are all these innovations doing to us?". Gatsby distills and probaly helped shape both of these ideas. i agree with Kit - Cat about it being a 'meditation'; thoughts about a personally or culturally significant idea, it just happens to be expressed as a story. It may not seem as vital now, but there's a lot of water under the bridge...
What's so great about the language, I don't understand/see it and I've just re-read the last page a bunch of times looking for whatever I'm missing... it just seems trite, "Gatsby believed in the green light", well, good for him. "Tomorrow we'll run faster, stretch our arms out further..." it could be out of a self-help book.
That's fair enough really. if i had a copy to hand i might try to isolate what i liked about it, but, you know, you've obviously not read it in a dismissive way, you didn't get much out of it, that's cool. i honestly found it moving, that's cool too. Sometimes people just don't like stuff. I don't subscribe to the idea that there are works of art that are unequivocally, inherently good and that people who don't 'get' them aren't reading them properly. But, like KCC said, you shouldn't dismiss the whole world of what is considered 'lit' because of this one book, there are so many writers and styles out there.
"How can you say the ending is sad when you acknowledge that Gatsby is an unsympathetic character? So nobody comes to his funeral, nobody really liked him, well I can understand why, he was practically a stalker. "
Well, you have to admit that the situation as a whole is pretty sad, those people who didn't come to his funeral couldn't get enough of his parties. Yeah, he was unsympathetic, but wasn't he a product of his environment? I don't know, the death is a damp squib, but if the world he lived in hadn't bled all genuine emotion from its inhabitants, it wouldn't pass so unnoticed, it might not even have been necessary. Isn't it sad that things have come to that state in the first place?
(why do you say Jordan can't engage in human contact?)
Quoted that one from the Mrs., can't help you there, sorry.
If it's social criticism, its context just seems too dated to matter.
that ties in to my point about the 'barometer' at the top of this post. and it's a big topic. my 2p: we're a product of our history, so it's never irrelevant.
i feel like i'm on shaky ground talking about gatsby, as i said, it's a while since i read it.
Here's a suggestion for a good book: "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon. One of my faves (i'd rather reread that than gatsby). Crazily dense conspiracy theory stuff. Hip, and very funny (look out for the scene with The Paranoids). As for how to read things, i dunno. i haven't studied eng. lit. formally since 18, and know nowt about critical theory. for this one, 'slowly' is probably good advice, as the prose is fucking dense. Also, i believe, Alfred the Butler's favourite book. |
