The Great Gatsby Review

Review contains spoilers

What’s special about this book is the underlying themes the author has wrapped around the story. The book is narrated by Nick, a man who considers himself honest. At least that what he tells us initially. Nick is straightforward and sharp which makes him useful at narrating the events. He tells us things as it is with the occasional thoughts and side inputs. With him along for the ride we meet, Tom, Daisy (Nick’s cousin), Jordan, and Jay Gatsby.

From the get-go, you can tell that Nick seems to be the decent sort or at least fairly normal. He studied at Yale and fought in World War 1. He lives modestly compared to his rich neighbors and has no delusions of grandeur. However, that can’t be said for the rest of our cast. Tom and Daisy are not a happily married couple. Right at the beginning, Jordan, a friend of Daisy’s clues Nick in on the fact that Tom has a mistress and it has caused strife among the couple. Nick learns this while sitting in their house and sharing a meal. Talk about an awkward setting.

Tom could be considered a brute. When you read his characters' description you can just begin to imagine the type of man he must be.

“A sturdy, straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face, and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward … you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body”

As you can see Nick describes him rather aptly. Tom is also disrespectful, abusive to his mistress, and racist. So, a rather unlikable character. His wife, on the other hand, Daisy is described in a fragile sort of way. She appears indecisive and gossipy and is quite unhappy with the fact that her husband is cheating on her, and considering the times, she can only wait on the side.

Jordan was kind of fascinating to learn about. She’s not much of a main focus in the book but she does make for an interesting character. She seems to view the events around her as one would view a play. Watching the motions happen and being detached from it all. I wonder if that’s why Nick liked her. She was apathetic to what was happening but still watched it all. A background character like Nick who watched and made their judgments.

And now the character of the hour Jay Gatsby. The millionaire who lived right next to ‘humble’ Nick. The guy who threw grand parties all the time that had people from who knows where coming to enjoy. Gatsby is initially a mystery to the readers, one that leaves you itching to figure out. He is a study of contradictions as Nick points out in the story. Nick is rather suspicious of his story and his riches but doesn’t call Gatsby out on it.

Naturally, when the mystery around Gatsby is revealed I was initially disappointed. The author built a rather high peak for Gatsby’s mysteriousness so when all of it was revealed to be about a past love (this was halfway through the book), my initial thought was that it was rather anti-climactic. But my assumption was made too early and the climax of the plot was worth it.

It turns out that Gatsby knew Daisy as a past lover. He went to war and was penniless with nothing to his name when he finally came home. He wanted to make something off himself before going back to Daisy but he ended up being too late. Daisy was unable to handle the pressure of waiting and agreed to marry Tom. Thus, these two lovers were torn apart. But Gatsby still held on to the hope that he would win Daisy back. So, he becomes a bootlegger and makes himself a rich man. He builds his mansion close enough that he could look across the water near his house to look towards her. He kept that hope alive for so long and with Nicks’ help, he is finally able to reach out to her.

For a brief while, they are happy. To the point that they don’t have an overt reaction when Tom clues into the fact that his wife has a lover. Tom is a possessive type and he cannot stand the fact that he might be losing his wife. It infuriates him and he confronts the pair about it and outs Gatsby as a bootlegger. Hearing this makes Daisy distraught and unable to choose between them. She pleads that they all return to her place and leave it be for a while. She gets into the car with Gatsby while the rest are placed in Tom's car. On the way, while Daisy speeds off in distress she sees Tom's mistress running into the road and hits her with Gatsby’s car. It is unclear whether this was done in malicious intent or due to an accident.

Tom learns that his mistress has died and this upsets him. He is unaware that it was Daisy who killed her and thus he places the blame on Gatsby. To get revenge, he clues his mistresses’ husband onto who the car belonged to and this leads the man to shoot Gatsby and himself. Tom having dealt with Gatsby (although at that point, he did not know whether Gatsby was dead yet) talks to his wife. The talk is not written out but it is implied that he sowed more doubts about Gatsby and his illegal activities.

The two then leave the area, likely so that they will not be linked to anything and to put it all behind them. Meanwhile, Nick has to deal with Gatsby’s funeral. The funeral is rather pathetic in terms of people coming to pay their respects. The only people present are Nick, Gatsby’s father, and the priest. This shows us that while Gatsby managed to cultivate materialistic goods, he spent no time in making relationships. He was so obsessed with winning back his past love that he didn’t realize that she had already passed him by. This was part of the underlying theme I mentioned in the beginning. The author writes pieces of himself in this book. He is both Gatsby and Nick. While he pines for a past love, he is skeptical of the future. The author was pessimistic about the capitalist boom in the 1920s and it shows as he writes out Jay Gatsby’s story. The author critiques the American dream by how Gatsby had to struggle through life to earn the same status as his lover. Jay Gatsby might have started right but he screws up along the way. Even though he makes it to the top, he is never accepted and he ends up dying for it.

The way the author managed to convey his sadness at what he believed to be the end of the American dream can be seen in his final lines.

“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . .. And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”