Why Do We Keep Reading the Great Gatsby? | Hacker News Reader

Why Do We Keep Reading the Great Gatsby?

theparisreview.org

53 pointssamclemens85 comments

The ending conclusion is so bizarre to me.

From the article:

> That’s a question to think about as you start to read this thing, whether for the first or fifty-first time. Daisy is this man’s objective, but she’s the wrong fantasy. It was never her he wanted. Not really. It was America. One that’s never existed. Just a movie of it. America.

My reading is the exact opposite. He falls deeply in love as a young man, cannot correctly frame this infatuation with Daisy, and spend his entire life in trying to win her back. The wealth was a means to an end. Rather than being purposeful about his love for her, he goes about it in an almost timeless fashion. Gatzby makes himself visible in the largest way he can, stretching out into the world, without actually directly aiming for her. Hence all the parties, so eventually Daisy must get caught up in his orbit, just by the sheer enormity of his presence. It was _exactly_ her he wanted, and the mansion across the water, the sports cars, were the elaborate mechanisms to get her. Not "america" or whatever. The ambiguity is if she truly loved him, or if Daisy just got caught up by the sheer gravitational pull of it all.

It's happened to be set in the roaring 20s because that's when the book was written, the self-made man was already a trope in american literature, as was the excess of the nouveau riche. It's a book - quite simply - about (mostly) unrequited love, and the length men equate achievement with desirability.

I read it over the weekend and was pleasantly surprised.

The story is thin, the underlying themes are a bit richer, but it is the style that is extraordinary. I have highlighted many, many sentences just for their delightful form, rich descriptiveness and poignant observational value.

Other than that, the place in time and bottled up description of the roaring 20s are other reasons people keep referring to it.

I’ve just read Tender is the Night, and while I didn’t love it like I loved The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald knocks it out of the park with “poignant observational value”.

“Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.”

That was a favourite sentence.

I'm not native and also am blown away by Fitzgerald writing, reading the great gatsby and tender is the night afterwards. They are rather different books, but I loved the characters in tender is the night a lot more, so my preference would go to this one I guess.

What's funny to me — and I mean this sincerely, not as a troll — almost all the examples of good writing in Gatsby in this thread and the target article seem overwrought to me. If you'd present them to me out of context, I'd think they were examples of comically bad writing.

I'm sort of neutral about The Great Gatsby. It's not my favorite but I think it's become a popular testament to its era. Because that era in many ways is the dawning of our own, it has special relevance.

> almost all the examples of good writing in Gatsby in this thread and the target article seem overwrought to me. If you'd present them to me out of context, I'd think they were examples of comically bad writing

Evocative, overwrought, comically bad in hindsight—in a book about the 1920s.

They are. I for one hate the style. Fitzgerald seems tone deaf about the number of multi syllabic words he uses in a sentence, as a result the rhythm becomes monotonous. I think people who are more visual in their reading like him.

> as a result the rhythm becomes monotonous.

Surprises me, as Fitzgerald has about the least monotonous prose of any author I've read. It's about as varied as Vonnegut, to me.

I don't really know what it means to read visually, but I read about of a quarter of Tender is the Night out loud to myself, which would be 'audio reading', if anything.

I kind of feel Fitzgerald gets a lot more press than his contemporaries like Dresier, John O' Hara and Sinclair Lewis. How does Gatsby hold up against 'Sister Carrie' or 'An American Trajedy' or 'Main Street' or 'Babbitt'?

I suppose I have picked the wrong time to start reading more of the "serious" stuff on the Internet and offline. This article would have been ok except for the totally random mention of blackface which read like a fulfillment of the current editorial house rules than an organic part. Of course the kicker is the mention of "forty-five" because you haven't written something of substance until you make some sort of oblique reference to him.

"It would have been an age in which self-cultivation construes as a delusion of the American dream. You could build a fortune, then afford to build an identity"

I had always thought the American Dream was rising from a lower class to have a humble house, a few children, a stable Mon-Fri job, and some basic comforts.

Where did the idea that the American Dream is about riches come from?

Note that I'm not saying the American Dream is unique. I just never heard that it somehow was tied to getting rich.

Getting rich has been a part of the American dream since at least the gold rush, the idea of striking out west to make your fortune.

More generally I’d argue that the American dream is that we made a country with greater social mobility than any other. That from any start, through hard work and intelligence you could become either middle class or rich according to your will. That the only thing holding you back would be your ability to capitalize on opportunities.

It is of course, a dream that was either never true or has ended. It is demonstrably false that the US has greater social mobility than many of our contemporary first world countries. While there is still opportunity here, and social mobility is far from impossible, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor is probably closer to the truth of modern America than the American dream of a fully socially mobile society.

What are the countries with higher mobility. Including those for the mobility of immigrants. Just wondering if you still have some sources around to research.

>fully socially mobile society.

Such a thing has never existed and never will. There's not much space at the top.

>demonstrably false

Then demonstrate it. And don't use spurious derived measures like some abstract social mobility index, argue an actual case. The US is still the place where you move to if you want to truly make it big in life, even if you've got lottery odds of success. I say this as a resident of a fairly well off European country.

Strange coincidence - I just read it for the first time, and I’m pushing 50. I thought it was incredible. So much packed into so few words.

'Cause people often acting like Gatsby: live in a mirage, unrealistic dreams, high expectations, not always (so) romantic as described in the book. So there are natural reasons to be sympathetic.

Have doubts if you can understand it all in high school, but for 20-30+ people it's great book and shows perfectly what happened if you are obsessed with your dreams.

Can we agree it's not-the-best but has a good moral message about the danger of living in an illusionary bubble?

The book’s message about fantasy is much richer than you’re giving it credit for.

Gatsby isn’t simply a wild dreamer, he has a very specific dream, a dream that is wrapped up in the individualistic American dream and its tension with class. He’s also not living in an illusion, it’s repeatedly noted that he’s chasing the past (which he had with Daisy), but fatally cannot catch it because he needs something he had to have owned before he was even born. Nobility.

Gatsby is an enormously capable and wonderful person. He is both ridiculously resourceful, and interpersonally treasured. He falls in love with a rich young woman, Daisy, who herself is interpersonally treasured but also whose wealth is an inevitable draw on the dirt poor Gatsby.

Against all odds, Gatsby rises through American life to be possibly even richer than Tom Buchanan, the old-money rich man Daisy marries. Despite Gatsby’s accomplishments and abilities, he is still unable to wrest back Daisy from her old money life, highlighting the distance between them that was always class-based and foundational, a distance that would had wrecked their relationship even if Gatsby had never gone to war and left Daisy. The old-money Daisy and Tom “were careless people”, notes Nick the narrator. Gatsby’s fatal flaw was how much he cared about and believed in the American Dream and those who supposedly occupied it. He cared and did everything right, but they didn’t care that he did, because the American Dream means nothing to the upper-class. Climb it, against all odds, and they’ll still sneer, or in Daisy’s case be too weak to abandon the security of class.

I don’t think you should read The Great Gatsby for it’s moral message about living in an illusion. It’s a story about the American Dream and it’s conflict with class.

Having written that out stream of consciousness style, I’ve gone to check the Wikipedia and under Analysis the top two subheadings are “The American Dream” and “Class Permanence” so I think I have picked up what Fitzgerald was putting down, more or less.

I initially loved The Great Gatsby because Fitzgerald writes beautiful sentences, and because Gatsby had a Randian hero quality to him. But after a while the political and gender commentary has become equally as valued.

Your takeaway is much deeper than mine was; it might have been informed by more world knowledge than I had when in highschool. That might explain why others say they got more out of the book later in life, after having been exposed to the concepts that weren't something I'd even known to look for at that point in my life (and thus were also not stored in my impression of slogging through the book).

Yeah I read the book first at like 22-23, then at 25-26.

I never had to read it in high school, but as school reading goes, I bet I would have loathed it.

I had to read _Catcher In The Rye_ and yeah, did not like it.

Great take

Somewhat related: the staff at NPR's Planet Money recently released a 4.5-hour reading of the Great Gatsby.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/14/956800308/the-great-gatsby

BBC's In Our Time (pretty good podcast) also did an episode on The Great Gatsby: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r4tq

I didn't like it. I don't get what is so good about its style. The prose is too purple and it meanders a lot. Even for its time the style feels choppy.

Purple? How is prose purple? Genuinely curious if this is an alternate usage for the word or a typo.

Google says "prose that is too elaborate or ornate".

There's a meandering article here but not much of a thesis.

Even when the author addresses the title of the article itself ("So again: Why this book—for ninety-six years, over and over?") he goes back to meandering.

It seems like the author is trying to say something between "we read it because it's like watching celebrity drama and awful people are fun to watch" or "we read it because it's the American Dream" or "something along those lines, but again, it meanders so badly between unrelated (probably true, or at least opinion) statement to other (probably true, or at least opinion) statement where it ultimately ends up going nowhere.

The thesis is that we read the book because it’s about performativity, and Americans have a different relationship with performativity than Europeans do. Every paragraph in the article from “so again” onwards is about performativity.

An example of performativity, from the book but not mentioned in the article—Gatsby’s house has bookshelves filled with books, presumably never read, only there for decoration. Gatsby is performing the part of being rich. Since Americans do not have nobility, we take our performance cues (how to act upper class) by imitating Europeans. It’s a hundred years later and we still imitate Europeans and ape European culture when we want to pretend to be rich and upper-class.

My wife got a high end Ph.D. in sociology: E.g., two of her profs were President, American Sociological Society. Well, high end sociology tries to be a science of groups of people.

Well, the theory of that field can start with a statement, observation, claim such as

"It’s a hundred years later and we still imitate Europeans and ape European culture when we want to pretend to be rich and upper-class."

I can believe that some or much of that is true! E.g., way back there when I wanted to learn to cook so I could serve something good to guests, I went for European cooking, sure, especially French cooking. Much of that cooking is still like the first class dinner scene from the movie Titanic! Even now, I'd like to serve guests something from Vienna coffee house cakes -- some of which look spectacular, even if actually they don't taste better than good American apple pie, warm, with good vanilla ice cream!

So, the statement seems clear enough, might seem like good insight, maybe it's obviously true, etc. Still, it turns out, it is usually not easy actually to validate such a statement just from data, e.g., survey data, and associated statistics. More generally, literature, i.e., belle lettre, is awash in statements that maybe one would like to validate with data and statistics as sociology science but which in practice is tough to do.

But for belle lettre, there is a way out!

First, f'get about asking if the statement is true in some scientific or statistical sense.

Second, instead, call the statement art as in the definition "the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion". Then look at the statement as an example of such "communication, interpretation", that is, just see if the statement does communicate some emotions, impressions, feelings, beliefs, behaviors, suspicions, etc. of some people, maybe even some strange people with no attempt to consider average, most, or all people.

First, then with a lot of such examples of belle lettre, can accumulate a catalog of possibilities for people, call it a collection of Bayesian statistics priors, as first cut guesses when meet a new person.

Second, if some of those claims, etc., from literature seem to describe ones self, then can start to believe that are not alone, not the Lone Ranger, not a total anomaly different from everyone else.

Uh, I wish my various literature teachers, at least one of them, would have made those points to me!

> ... they don't taste better than good American apple pie, warm, with good vanilla ice cream!

Ahem... :) "Apple pie was brought to the colonies by the English, the Dutch, and the Swedes during the 17th and 18th centuries." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_pie

For a small amount of bonus irony, apples themselves are not native to the Americas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange

Yes, a great deal of American food was not invented in America. What's your point?

This article is written in what's becoming a new modern 'style' in which the author doesn't say much of anything at all, but makes references, references, and allusions to modern shibboleths and meta-idioms.

This is the high brow version of a 4chan post - its only purpose is to show how clever the author is, and to make the reader feel clever for being in on it.

> This article is written in what's becoming a new modern 'style' in which the author doesn't say much of anything at all, but makes references, references, and allusions to modern shibboleths and meta-idioms.

Your comment is written in what's becoming a new modern 'style' in which the author rejects the notion that there can be anything smart besides what they're familiar with, and assumes that if they don't get it, then there must be nothing there to get—so anybody who claims to have gotten something from it must therefore be following some cargo cult.

As you might be able to tell, this comment breaks some of the first guidelines of HN, namely these two

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

In short - I didn't say the things you're implying I do, and your comment comes off as bad faith posturing.

So I don't remember anything of the book itself, but I do remember my opinion of it when we read it back in highschool being very similar to your "meandering and going nowhere". Maybe the article's author is such a fan because they see themselves in the book's writing style.

Don't disagree, yet last paragraph seems to claim a thesis:

>Daisy is this man’s objective, but she’s the wrong fantasy. It was never her he wanted. Not really. It was America.

Trouble is, the reviewer is dead wrong on Gatsby's psychology. Gatsby, like the protagonist of Tender, and various characters from his short stories, is a working-out of the central tragedy of Fitzgerald's own life, his failure to find a soul-mate. This is hinted at in Hemingway's Moveable Feast, and laid out fairly plainly in some of his letters.

Gatsby in particular fails because he fixes his desire on an unworthy object, who does not return his love. With mirror symmetry, Gatsby himself is unworthy of the love of a decent woman, being a grifter. The dramatic resolution can only be death for Gatsby.

It can be hard to appreciate The Great Gatsby if, like many Americans, you were forced to read it in high school. The book is stained with your own memories of high school.

Even if you like reading, the experience of being forced to read some particular book can make it feel like the book itself has wronged you.

I love reading. I didn't read it until my early 30s, other than the last lines, there's nothing memorable at all about it, and honestly they're so out of character of the rest of the book, they feel like they were taken from something else. I kept waiting for it to get good. I'm still waiting.

The book can’t possibly live up to its reputation. I still think it’s a good book.

To each his own, but I’ll add that my experiences are much like grandparent post’s. I “read” it in high school (I.e. usually just read cliffnotes on the internet) and it was just another boring book. I read it again in my mid 20s and it hit me like nothing else, particularly the last chapter. I still remember smiling at the beauty and eloquence of that end, it resonated especially to me for its description of a person’s aspirations and authenticity in the dimension of our human relationships and our professional goals, as that was something I was myself struggling with at that time.

I recommend giving it a read. And if you can’t, I guess watch the movie: https://youtu.be/rARN6agiW7o of course the movie gets a lot of it wrong, with its choice of music and all, but at least it’s got interesting Baz Luhrmann choreography.

As someone else who read it for the first time as an adult, it’s a perfectly fine book. But it certainly doesn’t deserve the iconic status it seems to have in the US.

I had the same experience with it, around the same age.

I also read "On the road" far too late in life, and it just didn't work for me.

I couldn't stand "on the road". Not sure when "too late" would be but I read it in my mind twenties. For a good amount of it, I gave it the benefit of the doubt telling myself it's simply from another time, but I quit half way through, unmoved, unchanged, and completely disinterested.

Yes! I read it and other classics when I was ~20. Maybe it was my age/where I was in my life at the moment, or that I didnt "read into it correctly", but it was one of the most boring things I've ever read. Nothing ever happened. I'm on of those the article mentions that would call it "a dud".

At the same period of time I also read Catcher in the Rye and loved it. Not sure if I would feel the same about it today. And maybe Gatsby would have grown on me now. But I'm not gonna try again, so much other good stuff to read.

De gustibus etc, but when you describe it like that I almost feel like you’re reading a different book. I can go to my bookshelf, pick up my copy of Gatsby, and almost any page I flip to I’m bound to find at least one striking sentence, vivid image, moment of sublime beauty.

That's just how taste works. I read Gatsby multiple times and found it a classic example of something that's popular but not universal. It was overall just bland and forgettable, because I just don't care for that kind of literature or story.

To each their own. I wouldn’t tell you you’re wrong - there are so many books (and films for that matter) over the years that people adored and just didn’t resonate with me at all.

Art is subjective, and in the same vein that the parent is saying your perception can be stained by your own negative memories of the time, I’d say it would also depend on how much of your own life you can relate to the story. I liked Gatsby, not as much as others, but I enjoyed the read.

As an anecdote - one of my favourite films is Contact. I can watch it and know it’s far from being objectively the greatest film ever made. It’s clearly not Oscar-worthy. Even so, the subject matter is something I’m so fascinated by that I watch that film at least once a year and I’m still enthralled by it.

From what I remember when I read it, the book (intentionally?) felt kind of 'jazzy'. No matter how hard I try, I can't really like jazz beyond the 'smooth jazz' muzak I might occasionally have on in the background.

A friend of mine studied jazz and is a great musician, and so I've come to appreciate it a bit more, but only conceptually. I still can't listen to it, for some reason.

I agree, in the Netherlands we were forced to read about 20 Dutch and 10 English books in "high school" (around age 16-17). I was an avid reader. I lost it for quite some years after that.

I did learn some things and some books were memorable but I think I actually enjoyed about 2-3 books of that time.

Same for me. Re-reading some of the books as an adult made me appreciate them more though.

The one exception was The Chosen. That book was just awesome.

I honestly think it's a terrible book that happened to retain its popularity because it got shoved in as a classic that you need to read.

There are works that I genuinely enjoy, like Anthem by Ayn Rand, even though it's moralistic propaganda.

I supposed I could reread the work again to see how I feel about it, but there are million of other works I could read.

You can’t really think it’s a terrible book, can you? I could understand thinking it’s merely good, but thinking that thousands upon thousands of literary types who absolutely treasure this work are simply wrong about its quality seems ridiculous.

Just because lot of people like or treasured the work doesn't mean I have a duty to share the same opinion as everyone else.

It's not a duty, but I'd certainly be nagged by the thought that I'd 'missed something'.

Novel writing isn't a completely subjective endeavour.

I had to read it in high school and, while I didn't really feel forced, I can't say I liked it very much.

It's clearly well written, but I just couldn't bring myself to give a damn about any single character throughout.

> but I just couldn't bring myself to give a damn about any single character throughout

That's okay—neither could they.

My high school assigned it. Thinking back now, I'm sure this was a mistake: most of the themes Gatsby deals with are way ahead of high-schoolers and just won't resonate with anyone under thirty.

My high school had it as required reading (over summer vacation). I was never a big reader to begin with so this book along with others (Jude the Obscure, A Separate Peace) have always been in a bad light for me in my mind (I guess having a book that I would tested and grilled over first thing in the school year does that). However, as an adult I found reading books such as IT, Silence of the Lambs and The Grapes of Wrath really entertaining. When I have some time I think I'll give this classic another try.

I loved reading, but hated every book I had to read in high school. Just couldn't relate to them. Only later did I realize most of them were pretty good and meaningful.

After not reading for a few years I felt both within and without.

Coincidentally, this novel was recently discussed on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r4tq

Hah, much as the host occasionally annoys me with his interrupts, I can't recommend this podcast enough!

Honestly, my only real complaint is the audio levels of the various guests. It seems like they're not normalized(?) enough so the audio goes from loud to very quiet.

But I can definitely recommend going through the backlog of this podcast. Great stuff.

It used to be better when they were in the same room, but I think now it is remote due to COVID.

Apparently we read it because of "forty-five" and capitalism as emotion. For certain definitions of "we," of "America."

This performance of an analysis strikes me as trying to be too meta-cute to take seriously. Maybe the author was practicing writing from the viewpoint of Holden Caulfield.

This is the second reference to The Catcher in the Rye I see in this thread... If Great Gatsby is anything like that book, I don't want it any closer to me than orbital distances.

The article reminds me more of Catcher in the Rye than The Great Gatsby does.

I've never read it, it wasn't part of school (Yes, I'm in the U.S.), and I'm not sure anyone I know has read it (at last we've never discussed it).

This is a really funny article for me to see, because I am currently sitting in high school, ignoring my teacher who is teaching this book. Great timing.

English is fundamentally a culture class. The goal is to instill certain values through required literature. From what I recall the Great Gatsby is mainly about the ills of great wealth and gilded age capitalism.

If you talk about the themes of the book in a supportive way you're certain to get better grades. Don't just recap what you've read, endorse what they are trying to teach you and you'll be a much more successful English student.

In the US (at least several decades ago when I was in school... I'm old) this was sadly not true for AP English.

It's very much about understanding the themes not just recapping what you read. But there was no propagandization involved. Mein Kampf was a summer reading choice although I think I ended up reading Grapes of Wrath.

Sure, I didn't mean to come at this with a view that it's propaganda. Rather, they're trying to instill values that make you a good citizen. Looking back on my comment it does come off as rather cynical. Probably because I had a rough time in English class and I spent most of my time making summaries rather than making insights.

Because it's a crappy version of the count of monte cristo.

I don't think we'll ever see the Count of Monte Cristo assigned in US high schools. It's too long.

Aren't you taking a stretch here? Plotwise, both protagonists have different reasons to attain their goals. And besides the plot, don't they handle different topics?

They're both about wealthy enigmatic characters (albeit the count of monte cristo book doesn't keep the count's purposes a mystery) who throw extravagant parties. Both characters seem emotionally distant and turn out to be excessively obsessed with the past. They both feature a lot of tragedy and revenge and the titular character meets their love from long ago who is now married to someone else.

They both have connections to the criminal underground, they both anger the husband of their love causing death.

Not exact duplicates by any means, but the similarities are there.

Having similarities doesn't mean something is a crappy version. What's behind the similarities is different as well, for example the reason for their obsession with the past. I'm sure you can find similarities between many stories when you do it in such a vague way.

Besides that, there's more to those books than the main plot. I always assumed that TGG is this well regarded because of themes it handles and how they're presented by the story of Gatsby. The same goes for The Count of Monte Cristo. I find them to be too different to call on even a version of the other, let alone a crappy one.

I think that revenge and intricate interpersonal plots should just be avoided unless someone intends on outdoing the count of monte cristo. Maybe it's unreasonable but that's how I see it. I guess really the only things I appreciate in the great gatsby are the things in it that remind me of the count.

"The tragedy here is the death of the heart, capitalism as an emotion."

The piece seems to equate capitalism with materialism. But the former is an economic system; the latter a universal human flaw.

Winning material wealth doesn't win love or happiness. Living in a country with a few socialist policies doesn't magically make you immune from falling into that trap.

> Materialism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Materialism

How is materialism a universal human flaw? From context I would assume you mean greed.

Hmm, I guess I was using an informal term, but I don't think greed quite fits, either.

I think of greed as self-defeating. Letting your bet ride on the blackjack table, or believing a conman in hopes of a get-rich-quick scheme.

What I was trying to express when I said "materialism" is the idea that money is the solution to any problem, and that everyone else values money as much as you do.

> ma·te·ri·al·is·tic

excessively concerned with material possessions; money-oriented.

Their use of materialism is correct. Materialism has multiple meanings.

>The piece seems to equate capitalism with materialism.

You assume the piece seeks to make an argument, or even a statement, as opposed to making vague references to popular/twitter sentiment.

Probably because English teachers have all read it and can teach it if they need to switch into teaching that class.

It’s a trash book but material to teach books takes a lot of time and effort to conjure up and honestly not worth it unless there’s a clearly better successor to replace the book with.

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