The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald's third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession", it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s. The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

The Great Gatsby is one of my all-time favourite books. Scott Fitzgerald perfectly captures the zeitgeist of New York in the Roaring Twenties, with the characters attending extravagant parties, disobeying the Prohibition and dancing to jazz.

Nick Carraway tells the story. Through his cousin Daisy Buchanan, Nick meets the famed Jay Gatsby, who lives in a fabulous mansion on Long Island and who is in love with Daisy. The characters spend the summer socialising in New York City and attending parties at Gatsby’s mansion. On the surface, they have an enviable lifestyle. However, as we dig deeper into the characters’ minds and past experiences, we learn that some of them are deeply unhappy in ways that no amount of money can solve.

When I studied The Great Gatsby at school, I disliked it solely because I disliked all of the characters. They are all flawed – many of them are self-centred, self-righteous or dishonest. I particularly disliked Daisy for (in my teenage interpretation) being bland, and attempting to cover up her blandness by talking in ridiculous hyperbole (“I’m p-paralysed with happiness”). My rule-abiding teenage self also disapproved of the characters’ willingness to disregard the Prohibition, led by Gatsby himself.

On rereading The Great Gatsby as an adult, I realised two things. First, there is far more depth to all of the characters than I had realised. Daisy is by no means bland; she is conflicted and deeply unhappy, and is perpetually adopting an exaggerated appearance of perfect happiness. Similarly, Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle is admired by everyone, and causes them to overlook the unhappiness he feels about his unrequited love for Daisy.

Secondly, the characters’ flaws are exactly what makes The Great Gatsby such a remarkable piece of literature: they make Scott Fitzgerald’s characters genuinely realistic. The characters are changeable and whimsical and they make poor decisions, making them much more complex than a character who exhibits consistent thoughts and behaviours throughout a book. In The Great Gatsby, when a character has made a poor decision, they do not simply own up to it and learn from their mistakes. They self-justify, hide it, or try to paint themselves in a better light. Other characters are either quick to judge that character’s decision harshly, or they are far less concerned about it than the character in question. This is human, and Scott Fitzgerald perfectly captures these tensions through Nick’s narrative which – as we increasingly realise – is not entirely reliable, as it is at times sanctimonious and full of self-exoneration.

In writing these characters, Scott Fitzgerald’s job was perhaps simplified by the fact that he based many of them on himself and his wife Zelda and their friends, who engaged in similar social activities to the characters in his books. In fact, the introduction to my edition of The Great Gatsby says that Scott Fitzgerald once said “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels”. Even so, to know a person so well as to portray them as such an authentic fictional character is quite extraordinary.

The Great Gatsby is a complex book and there is more to it each time I read it. It is not difficult to see why it was so popular when it was published – Scott Fitzgerald had already published two novels depicting the Jazz Age (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned) but The Great Gatsby was shorter and improved the prose style and plot devices he had utilised in his previous novels, as well as the setting being completely up to speed on a social level. It was highly praised by contemporary writers and remains one of the most popular classics to this day.

(Thank you to H for the picture!)