you've never read it, I'm receiving from this
Why would I lie about reading this, do you think I'm just some forget that sits around and pretends to have read books to seem sophisticated?
What I got from it is that it was sort of like a modern Romeo and Juliet, almost. It was a story of the intersection of love and wealth, using the extravagance of the 1920's as a backdrop for the aspirations of a self-made man, James Gatz who created a persona of richness in order to win the love that fate swiped out from under his hands. It's also an interesting study in how wealth and greed corrupts and yet disguises ugliness and is evidenced in the whole egg/valley of ashes contrast, along with the whole interaction between Tom and his mistress.
Hm, I guess one of my favorite scenes from the book (that wouldn't show up on Sparknotes if you're just thinking I pulled this off the internet) was the part where Tom was taking Myrtle into town and she wants to buy a dog. The guy selling them is basically a scam artist leading Myrtle on the whole time and Tom is just correcting and letting Myrtle be deceived by this guy and then pays an absurdly high price for the dog just to sate Myrtle.
I also really love how the book is told from the perspective of a somewhat detached narrator, who is definitely a character in the story but is used to look upon the characters with some minor degree of bias and yet not be a completely neutral, completely outside narrator; it adds another layer of depth to the story, yet another way in which Fitzgerald is a brilliant writer and storyteller.
I was forced to read this book last year for a US lit class. I read
most of it, but again, I didn't like how flowery Fitzgerald's writing is in contrast to writers like Kurt Vonnegut which give you very blunt but accurate descriptions of what's going on, very to the point. I did like the story, though, and doing a study of the book in class really helped because my teacher helped to sort of cut through the really dense prose and extract the great symbolism of almost every part of the book (like the scene in the library in which a patron of one of Gatsby's parties notes that his books are real, but have never been read, serving an illustration of how Gatsby is real, actually rich, but not exactly genuine) and how this ultimately leads to the communication of the broader themes of the book, wealth, love, facades, greed, desire, etc.
