The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Each year during my annual reading of The Great Gatsby, I vow to focus on one theme in order to understand the book more deeply. And there are plenty of themes to examine: true love, hope and the American Dream, money and the class system, the decline of moral responsibility coincident with the arrival of movies, bootleg hooch, and the Charleston. It may be read too as a defining portrait of the 1920s – an era Fitzgerald himself dubbed The Jazz Age – replete with beaded evening gowns, yellow roadsters, and free-flowing champagne. Gatsby is all these things and more, but before I reach even the end of Chapter I, I’ve forgotten my analytic plans and am lost in the pure poetry of its language. It may well be the “intricately patterned” book Fitzgerald intended to write, it may be rife with term paper topics, but in the end, it is, according to the late Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli, “just a masterpiece.” Every sentence is a distillation, each deliberate word evoking whole worlds. Fitzgerald accomplishes in his short description of Gatsby gazing across an expanse of dark water what lesser writers would take pages to express, defining the essence of the character and the novel in a minimum of images: the silver pepper of stars overhead, Gatsby’s nearly imperceptible trembling, a single green light at the end of the pier. I careen through the book, eager to savor singular, rhythmic phrases describing Gatsby’s gorgeous pink rag of a suit, glasses of gin rickeys clicking with ice, Daisy blossoming like a flower beneath the autumn moon of Louisville. It’s that language that drives me to re-read sections, paragraphs, phrases for the sheer beauty of the words, astounded every time by Fitzgerald’s genius and control. Critics have argued since its publication in 1925 over whether or not Gatsby is the Great American Novel. In truth, perhaps it is not a novel at all but a poem – albeit a poem 47,000 words long, each perfect one charged to the utmost with beauty, emotion, and meaning. Sarah Jensen
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