I have read Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in high school as part of the American literature education. Back then, I was more curious about the dazzling and gilded Roaring Twenties it described, the Jazz Age and all. As they announced the new Gatsby movie would premier in May, I was excited because of it starring DiCaprio, one of my favorite actor of all times. After watching it, I was brought back to enjoy the story from a new light. Nick Carraway’s narration in the movie had a good contribution to that. The first time I read it, the flaws in every character kept me back from appreciating them in their own time. I still remember the title of my essay almost three years ago reads like “All that Glitters Are Not Gold: Gatsby the Great Curator.” The writing was more
on the critical side of Gatsby and his grotesque approach to constructing an image of excessive wealth. Much of the decadence and emptiness associated with society especially the elite then is no less true today. We may not be at an economic peak as it was, but this only leaves us to greater lack of “richness,” culturally, intellectually, financially, and etc. The valley of ashes is perhaps more pervasive today.
The character Myrtle didn’t not enchant me and her death to me was fairly deserved. However, I see her more as a victim of her very shortcomings which may as well be a blessing. There’s a lot of parallel that can be drawn between her and Gatsby. They both chase after wealth and glamor, they are both in love with a Buchanan, they both share hopes that surpass their milieus, and both their objects of fancy which lead to their deaths prove unworthy of them.
I switched from pitying Gatsby to pitying those who think of themselves better than him. After all, “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” This notion of an outsider versus an insider is misleading and disparaging. Characters who think they are real elite end up being not so close to it and those who they discriminate from being one of them appear to be not so far from being respectable. With the twists of events, Gatsby turns out to the be by far the most spirited, vivacious, earnest, conscious and hearty individual.
Gatsby is reaching straight towards that pure, flickering green light across the bay with every single effort allowed to him and beyond. Till death is he not able to hold on to it. But it is for that sweet and unwavering dream he lived larger than anyone else in the book. He is almost a hero in the sense that he strives for his dream to death and hasn’t given up the very moment he loses his last breath. What he has done none of the selfish people like Daisy and Tom can ever understand or appreciate. Thus, they are more shameless than Jay.
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Anybody Anything 