21th, October: The Great Gatsby

Just after I began to read ‘The Great Gatsby’, I was happy to acknowledge that I’m reading some of the very best of English literature. I started thinking about what makes a novel the best, and wondered if any novel can be really great if its background is not related to the reader. (The question itself is largely theoretical, of course, since at least the motif of human nature makes some relation to all readers). Well, it took lots of pages until I even remotely felt that I’m reading some really great literature; not as if I’d found it mediocre before, only it seemed nothing more than a fairly written thing about rich New Yorkers in the 1920’s, and I couldn’t see how could this story evolve into a reasonable crisis, or how this (polite and intelligent, but otherwise not very special) Gatsby will prove to be great – great enough to be the great man of one of the greatest novels. In the end, however, it turns out not to be solely a ‘roaring twenties’ story, but also an ageless character’s struggle with this setting. He’s a very romantic character in the classical sense, but he appears in a scenery that is everything but romantic. While this scenery corrupts his dreams and methods in a way it does everyone else’s, it doesn’t affect his character. He pursues his love and wealth (which is his preference even though it’s also needed to marry Daisy), his methods are illegal, but he knows what he is doing, and is not distracted by money, power, or anything else, nor his good intended and loyal character have changed, even though he’s not educated to cope with being wealthy. It’s his picture of Daisy that’s changed: since she’s nowhere near sublime enough to be worthy of such an effort, her image gets overromanticised Gatsby, is aware of that – at least after he meets Daisy again – but he doesn’t back out. When he ultimately fails, he considers his role in life finished. Whether that means a great character or a coward is a subject to controversy, of course, but this kind of character makes The Great Gatsby a classic, nevertheless.