The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald03.05.26
This book critiques the high-society of an optimistic generation. A man who creates his own reputation, and one who rides the coattails of his parents: how they meet their true motivations, and where they lead.
The narrator has a strange disinterest that is inexplicably communicated by the way that he tells his story. He speaks of things as if he is a person that lets life live him, rather than the other way around. He is a passive observer, a pawn to everyone else's game. But Gatsby is a man who takes control of and manipulates his life in order to gain one thing. They contrast each other. One disinterested, the other fixated.
The style - oh the style. It is just incredible. Take every sentence on its own and you have before you an artwork to stop and admire. Fitzgerald is simply a master of wordplay. Nothing I have read lately is anything comparable to his style.
It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have already expended your own powers of adjustment.
He captures the feeling of looking at something with fresh eyes, after having grown accustomed to it, yet does so in such a poetical way. The prose is taught with meaning, like poetry. No blade would be sharp enough to dice it into anything more concise.
Every moment, the reader finds herself enamored with the words she reads, while the content is ostensibly packed of unusual happenstances. How could a writer whisper such a gripping tale, almost entirely through the lens of nearly mundane occurrences?