Why this book:  Selected by my reading group.  I vaguely remember reading it in high school.  It is so often referred to I thought it would be a good book to read again.

My Impressions:  This is not the same book I read in high school. Or at least it didn’t seem to be as I read it- obviously I read it with a whole new perspective.  I guess I understand why high school English teachers assign this book – it is short and on the surface a simple morality tale about how decadence and self-indulgence don’t pay.  On the surface it provides a glimpse into the debauched lives of wealthy young people, with the satisfying conclusion that wealth doesn’t make us happy, and that people who live as if middle-class morality doesn’t apply to them, suffer in the end.  Ok, maybe.  But I think that is a very limited perspective on this fascinating little book, and that is NOT what I read this time through.  This is a much more interesting book than that, and I think Fitzgerald had a different message.

The story is told from the perspective of Nick Carraway,  a cautious, but thoughtful  go-with-the-flow  kind of guy.  He is a somewhat dispassionate, sensitive and insightful observer of others, but not very engaged or engaging himself.  Carraway reminds me of the narrator in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.  The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men are stories told in the first person by shy, thoughtful, somewhat retiring narrators about larger than life protagonists who meet  tragic ends.    We get to know Jay Gatsby through Carraway’s eyes and Gatsby is much that Carraway is not – self-possessed, wealthy, confident, somewhat narcissistic.  Gatsby is an enigmatic intriguing character from the beginning, and we get to know him little by little throughout the book.  Fitgerald also introduces us to Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker to round out this group of well-to-do  twenty-or-early-thirty somethings with money and time to burn, living on Long Island, a short distance from NYC.   We see in their relationships with each other hypocrisy, pretense, confusion, disillusionment, resignation, and grudging admiration.  Gatsby is an admirable and tragic figure who succumbed to a passionate infatuation with a dream, embodied by poor Daisy, who was hardly worthy of his attention, but embodied his own dreams for himself and his future.   Poor Daisy, young, impressionable, beautiful,  charming, but not-too-bright, and not yet too worldly-wise.  She wanted something, but she wasn’t sure what – love, security, stability, a comfortable place in society, a good man to be married to?  Things that most women want? Gatsby surely wanted love and respectability, and was willing to go to great lengths to get it. 

I had to respect and admire Gatsby – in some ways more so than our cautious and moralizing narrator.  We know how Gatsby ended up – Fitzgerald does not leave us with the impression that the other characters would find happiness and/or fulfillment, though it is easy to predict that they would continue looking for it, in all the wrong places. 

The over-riding theme that I saw was the under-lying superficiality in the lives and relationships of people who take themselves and their good fortune entirely for granted, and give little thought to anything beyond fulfilling their own selfish fantasies.  The other sub-theme to this superficiality was how it leads to dysfunction and even toxicity in love relationships.  Gatsby and  Daisy, Tom and Daisy, Myrtle and  George Wilson,  Carraway and Jordan, Gatsby and his father, Carraway and Gatsby.

Beautifully and efficiently written, this deserves its place among the classics of American literature.