My Opinion of The Great Gatsby

The only reason I keep thinking about The Great Gatsby is wondering why people think it's such a great classic.

I read it less than two months ago but 1:) it feels like a long time ago and 2:) I haven't much thought of saying anything about it on here until today. It was only today that I got up enough interest in the book to give my opinion of it here. If it had deeply moved me, I would have immediately written about it.

Edger Allan Poe, in the only thing I've ever read of his, a rave review of The Adventures of Cherubina , stated that the said Cherubina had no claim to originality and that it would take a lot for him to say that something like that belonged in the cannon of English literature (after saying that Cherubina did).

I can see no more claim to originality in The Great Gatsby than in The Adventures of Cherubina . The plot is a variation on Le Grande Maulnes , materialism was by no means an unexplored theme, none of the characters jump out as particularly unusual, and the style is stereotypically early 20th century.

One of my favorite plot elements is character development and yet I found nothing to get excited about.

The metaphors are often unrealistic and sometimes very confusing.

It takes me all the way until the end to get interested in the character, and then as soon as I get interested in him, he's killed off...and it doesn't even seem to be his fault...nor does it have the piquant message of The Price of Youth where the characters are innocent but the wayward people around them mess up their lives. Gatsby is not innocent. He's adulterous and possibly criminal. But that isn't quite what leads to his death.

Once I thought of The Price of Youth it struck me that it does a better job at the Gatsby tragedy than Gatsby does...and it was written twenty years earlier by a nineteen-year-old girl.

When it comes to a moving tragedy of materialism, my favorite is The Squirrel-Cage by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. There you have pathos. There you have character development. There you have suspense. There you have causality. There you have realism. There you have eloquence. There you have all the things The Great Gatsby should have had.

And take her other book, The Bent Twig . Now that has originality...and it's another good critique of materialism.

All three of those books I mentioned are peculiar love stories that are ten times more beautiful than Daisy and Gatsby.

I had so many negative to things to say about Gatsby that I may have forgotten some. But just look at how The Adventures of Cherubina , The Price of Youth , The Squirrel-Cage , and The Bent Twig rose up and absorbed my mind as I was talking about Gatsby . They are truly memorable. I didn't just read and mostly forget about them. I had to write about them immediately after I read them and ever since they have come to mind and applied themselves to all sorts of things. Many times I have talked and talked about them. They have left me with things to mull on for a lifetime. I don't think I'll ever really forget them, partly because I'm always reliving them. I've already begun to forget The Great Gatsby because I don't care about it.

Do I have anything positive to say about The Great Gatsby ? Well, it's not a bad book - it's just overrated. It's taught me a few things about the 1920s I did not know before. I can now say that I've read that "marvelous" classic by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I can get all the references to it. It did have one really good description of a hot summer day that almost made me feel the heat. It had a few mildly funny places...and it did have a slight psychedelic quality to it.

Last note: don't believe anyone if they you that you can read The Great Gatsby in two hours. They may be able to read it in two hours, but the chances are that you can't. I couldn't. It probably took me four or five hours. And I think it felt longer than when I read Villette which is 600, maybe almost 700 pages.

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2 COMMENTS

Leah Charles on Mar 8, 2024 1:14 PM

I agree woth not seeing what all the hype is about. I thought it was fairly easy read, but it's not a book that I would pick up to read again on my free time. The one positive I had was that the test in school was pretty easy :)

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Scythrop Glowry on Mar 10, 2024 12:34 PM

in response to comment_91_1

Thanks for commenting! 👏👍👍👏 for finding it a fairly easy read.

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My Opinion of The Great Gatsby