Why? Because I love, love, love this book, far more than I should. I’m going to throw two questions out there to prime the pump, but don’t feel obliged to restrict yourself to these topics.
Thoughts, anyone? Bueller?
Gatsby’s the protag, by any definition. Carroway’s the narrator. They’re practically the definitions of the words. The language sometimes interfere’s with Fitzgerald’s meaning–it’s my single biggest complaint about him, in fact. Sometimes he writes flowery shit I’m pretty sure no one, including him, can make sense of.
I like his flowery language. To me, TGG seems to basically be a poem in prose; the beauty of the language is not beside the point, it is the point.
Sometime, I’d like to find you five or six sentences from Gatsby, and have you explain what he’s talking about. You’ll have your work cut out, I promise you.
Jay Gatsby is a tragic figure-he has achieved material success, but no real happiness.
Tom and Daisy Buchanan are two self-involved shits-they are “careless people”.
Nick Carroway sees everything and realizes that material wealth isn’t everything-he even contacts Gatsby’s dad (after Jay is murdered)-and the dad seems to be quite a shallow guy as well.
But the ultimate betrayal was Meyer Wolfsheim ("I believe in showing love to friends when they are alive…after that…(forget it (my quote)).
So Jay Gatsby passes…and the only people at the funeral are Nick and the dad.
My biggest frustration as an English teacher so far is my inability to get a student to fall as deeply in love with both this book and the character of Gatsby as I am. And I’m switching from American Lit to British Lit next year, so I am out of luck.
The language can be dense and difficult to understand but it’s beautiful. It’s one of those books where the words are almost a tactile pleasure. I like the story, but it’s the sound and the feel and the rhythm of the words that get me. I want to roll around in a big pile of words from this book. Yeah, I know that’s weird.
I do think the issue my students have is the language. They enjoy the more sensational aspects of the story, even if they don’t don’t see the tragedy - they laugh at things that I find utterly heartbreaking.
I had the biggest crush on Jay when I read the book in high school; and it killed me how unworthy Daisy was of his devotion. Every time I re-read this book as an adult woman, though, I gained more sympathy for Daisy. She’s still not a good person, but I understand some of her frustration. Even Tom becomes more sympathetic the older I get. So I guess I questions I bring to the table is - who are the sympathetic characters in this book? Why?
Izzat a challenge? Okay then.
This is about disillusionment. Gatsby is waiting for a phone call from Daisy because he believes she will acknowledge the “heroic” sacrifice he has made in taking the blame for killing someone in a car wreck for which she was, in fact, responsible. For ten years or more he has centered his world on her, or rather the idea of her; he has made himself into a man he believes worthy of her love and affection, and just as his love for her has been transformative for him, he believes she has or will or should be changed by that love so as to be a loving person who can appreciate his devotion. But Daisy does not call him; she never does anything to acknowledge what he is doing, not even to thank him for it. This shatters Gatsby, not merely because it reveals the essential selfishness of Daisy’s character but because it shows that love is far less powerful than he believed it to be. This alters his entire view of the world, which no longer seems to be a good and worthwhile place to him. The blue sky now seems as alien to him as it would if it were red; roses no longer seem beautiful, but now hideous. While he cannot deny the physicality of the world – he stands on earth, smells the grass, breathes the air – it no longer seems real, by which I meaningful, consequential, important, without the ordering scheme of love to turn chaos into order. In his despair nothing seems to matter, and living people seem like ghosts to him, and thus, though he sees the dead woman’s husband approaching him through the trees (and, implicitly, realizes that man has come to kill him), he does not try to defend or protect himself.
Nick is sympathetic in my view. When I have time to think deeply I will write why I call him the protagonist rather than Gatsby.
Obviously I agree with you about the language; I comment on it only to give a mock :mad: because you thought of calling its pleasures tactile before I did.
How is Tom sympathetic to you now? I too have warmed – well, grown less cold – to Daisy as the decades as passed, but my judgment of Tom has grown harsher.
Oh, I totally adore this book! It was one of the classics I forced my husband to read when we got married (and which, of course, he really liked). (The other was Pride and Prejudice, in which my husband insisted, and still does, that Mr. Bennett was the hero.)
I love the language. I hate Hemingway. I suppose these things are related.
I think Jay is really interesting because he’s a very sympathetic character, while at the same time doing all kinds of things that ought to make him unsympathetic. Which is something Nick struggles with as well, of course.
I don’t think Nick is the protagonist; he’s much more likable/sympathetic/empathic than Gatsby, but the book’s not about him.
I think I grew less cold to Daisy when I was a cold heartless college girl myself, and then more cold again when I grew out of that stage. (And especially when I became a mom… ouch. I can’t believe Tom and Daisy have a kid. Ouch.)
I’m not sure. I love Fitzgerald’s language and Papa H’s. It’s similar to liking both chocolate ice cream and orange sherbert.
Sympathetic may be the wrong word. I definitely pity him.
To me, Tom is unconsciously/subconsciously aware of how empty his lifestyle really is. His attempt to be intellectual by reading “Rise of the Colored Empires” not only reveals his racism and snobbery but his need to justify all that he has - he knows he has earned nothing for himself, and I think it bothers him on some level. So if being “white” is the one reason he has why he should be successful, I think he’ll cling to that. He’s also trying to make himself seem smart and scientific, when he’s really not that exceptional.
There’s also an element of “glory days” to is character I pity; we’re told he is “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.” He’s a very sad pathetic man at times. He’s also a huge asshole, which keeps me from really actually liking him.
I think that Tom also is similar to Gatsby in that he very much wants to be liked; Nick says as much in the first chapter: “I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.” Of course Tom doesn’t really get Nick and doesn’t realize that his attempts to get Nick to like him will have the opposite effect. That’s another thing I can pity/sympathize/empathize with - the human need to be liked is strong; and hard to overcome even when the people you want to like you aren’t worth the effort. It’s Gatsby’s case, the crowd he wants to be part of isn’t worth it; in Tom’s case, Nick’s regard is something worth having but Tom will never be worthy of it. Tom and Gatsby, as the two men in Daisy’s life, are foils to each other.
All the non-trivial characters are deeply unlikeable except Nick, who is mildly unlikeable because he is a hanger-on, in love with both Jay and Daisy.
The book was good.
The NES game was better. 
Those Japanese sure know literature, lol.
I had to read TGG in high school and didn’t think much of it. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t see anything in it and didn’t really like it either. I recently re-read it and was amazed at the difference between what I was reading and what I’d remembered reading.
Part of it was that all my English teacher cared about were eyes and colors. But mostly it was that at 15, I simply didn’t have the life experience to really understand or appreciate the book. Reading it again at 30-something, I get it. Now, I can see how tragic it all is in a way that would have just gone over my head then. It could be that your students just need time, which you, unfortunately, can’t give them in a semester long class.
I teach Gatsby every year and love it more each time. After many years, I now teach it as a contrast between the Romantic and the Modern, with Gatsby as the this hopeless anachronism in the midst of a world that no longer fits him. The kids “get” this in a way they didn’t get any other approach to the novel.
Seen that way, the language is essential because it shifts between Romantic (such as “the earth blowing the frogs full of life” and “wed[ding] her perishable breath to his”) when talking about Gatsby and the ironic, indirect dialogue of everyone else, or the raging Freudian imagery. [My favorite part for that is in chapter seven, where we have, in about 3 inches of text, references to train tunnels, blowing steam whistles, a lady “lapsing into heat” while “growing damp” and a dropped pocketbook (with a slap)] Juniors really start to see these shifts and see the different worldviews of Gatsby and the Buchannans, and Nick’s hopeless envy and scorn for Gatsby’s perpetual adolescence. Because they are at an age where they are pretty ambivalent about their own adolescence, this really speaks to them.
I don’t think there is a protagonist because really, no one changes. Nick almost does, but in the end he retreats to where he started: he goes back to wanting “no more glimpses” of “riotous” human hearts. Because they all stay still, I think you have to call it an ensemble: it’s no one’s story.
Ah, see. I think “sympathetic” and “likeable” are two different concepts. I am certainly capable of having sympathy for a character I don’t like. I would never be friends with a girl like Daisy; I couldn’t stand her if she were real. But as a character in a book, I sympathize with her.
Daisy is dishonest and careless and she messes with Gatsby’s emotions. She’s shallow. She’s utterly guilty of Myrtle’s death and by extension Wilson’s and Gatsby’s. She’s not a good person; she doesn’t react to her problems with grace and honor. But I also think she’s a very realistic young woman - and despite being a high school teacher, I am only 24 myself! So maybe that’s part of it. She admits to being in love with Tom once; his infidelity and his flaunting of it hurts her. She’s trapped by the expectations of he society; and she’s not strong enough to disregard them. And some of her quotes show a wisdom and self-awareness - saying that the best thing a girl can be is a pretty little fool; bitterly exclaiming that she has become “sophisticated.”
My students often dismiss Daisy as a “slut;” I think that’s an unfair descriptor. Her husband is sluttier by far at the very least!
Manda JO, that is… really cool. I’d never thought of it that way. Now I need to go read it again!
Hated it.
My high school had themed English classes. I really, really, really wanted to get into Science Fiction English. Unfortunately, my surname is at the ass-end of the alphabet, and that class filled up my the time they got to the 'L’s. (I was previously pulled out of an Ecological/Speculative Fiction/Science Fiction English class for the same reason, and was assigned to The English Teacher Nobody Liked.) I got stuck in Roaring '20s English. :mad: No doubt that affected my appreciation.
Not to threadshit. I’m not saying The Great Gatsby is bad. Indeed, everyone else I know who has read it likes it. I just couldn’t get into it. (FWIW, I got an A in the class.)
I don’t really remember the book, though I had to read it for a class and did well in the course. What I do remember was the movie adaptation…3 hours of dullness, during which I rambled a pointless letter to my best friend in a notebook we used to pass notes back and forth (teachers notice folded letters, they think passing a spiral-bound book is just giving someone their homework back!) I must have started the letter before the lecture where we watched the movie, but throughout it I bitched about the movie, tossed in random quotes and all in all ended up with 11 pages of nonsense that my bewildered friend asked if she actually was expected to read any of it. That letter is now a classic in our friendship “lore”, so I suppose I have The Great Gatsby to thank for that.
Once in a while I consider re-reading the book, to see if I can appreciate it without having to do all the dissection and, IMHO, destruction of the story generally required in English classes*. Then I think of that letter, and I wouldn’t want to actually enjoy the book, because it would ruin the fun of that joke with my friend!
*I always hated finding themes, compare and contrast yadda yadda…just give me the book and let me enjoy it. I’m currently reading Les Misérables and LOVING it, but everyone I know who has read it had to do it for school, which just made the book seem incredibly long and tedious. I guess there’s a reason I’m an engineer and not a literature major! Just give me a good story and let it stand on it’s own!
I had to read the book in college and detested it. As boring as soccer.
I barely remember it from high school lit, but I remember my opinion of it. Way too much setup and exposition and very little plot. You wouldn’t think you could find the murder of the main character after a chase scene boring, but I did. I didn’t feel any narrative flow at all.
Here’s what I remember. Everybody tells Nick Everything. Gatsby became rich to impress Daisy, but she was married by the time he had a chance. He likely had to dabble in some illegal stuff, but no one knew for sure. He had to play up his richness with everyone, even though he was shy, so he could have the girl. He succeeds, and they had an affair. Tom, Daisy’s husband, also had an affair, but when he found out about Daisy and Gatsby, he got his mistress’s husband to kill Gatsby, mistaking him for the mistress’s lover. Despite everyone treating Gasby like a king when he was alive, only Nick and his father came to his funeral. The American dream is futile.
See on paper it sounds exciting, but it was like the author sucked all the life out of it. Or maybe it was just my teacher.