What Makes Gatsby Great? Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald Again

F. Scott Fitzgerald is a familiar name well beyond the people who read his novels. Some of his stories have found a second life on screen.

The Great Gatsby is the book most closely associated with him. You can know the name Gatsby for years before opening it.

What Makes Gatsby Great?

The title sounds like a promise of grandeur. You might expect the life of a celebrated man. What does the book give us that makes him deserve the word great?

The story is told by Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s neighbor.

James Gatz comes from a poor family, renames himself Jay Gatsby and makes a fortune. He wants to win back Daisy, the woman he believes he has always loved. Through Nick, we watch Gatsby come up against the social distinction that money alone cannot erase.

Daisy and Gatsby had fallen in love when he was a young officer. After he went away, she married Tom Buchanan. Five years later, Gatsby buys a mansion in West Egg, across the bay from Daisy’s home in East Egg. He throws lavish parties, hoping that word might reach her or that she might walk through his door.

Devotion, or a Word Used With Irony?

When Fitzgerald calls Gatsby great, does he mean it? I kept wondering how much admiration and how much irony could fit inside the same word.

Part of the book’s power lies in how fully it draws Gatsby’s desire and how little it tells us what to make of him.

There is something moving about the steadiness of his longing. There is also a man so absorbed in his own hopes that he will not take Daisy’s marriage or the years they spent apart on their own terms.

A reader can find one side more persuasive today and the other on another reading. I came away thinking the greatness in the title might belong as much to the person who wrote the book.

The Dream Gatsby Cannot Reach

The story ends in grief. Gatsby comes close to recovering the life he wants. Then a fatal misunderstanding brings it to an end.

After the crowded parties, almost nobody comes to his funeral. Among the people who do are his father, Nick and the man Nick remembers meeting once in Gatsby’s library.

The emptiness of the funeral stays with me. The parties made it look as if Gatsby had drawn an entire world around himself. Few people are left to remember him when the lights go out.

The book gave me time to think about what we build a life around, and what remains of it when we are gone.

What would it mean to be great in the lives we have now?

Book Information

The Great Gatsby

Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Publication date

May 6, 2003 (Korean edition)

ISBN-13

9788937460753

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