The Great Gatsby
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Why read it
A mysterious millionaire throws the most extravagant parties on Long Island and attends none of them — because everything, the mansion, the shirts, the light on the water, exists for one married woman across the bay. The great American novel about wanting.
Narrator Nick Carraway rents a cottage next to Jay Gatsby's mansion in the summer of 1922 and becomes the confidant of a man who built a fortune, a name, and an entire self to win back Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald's subject is the American Dream at its most radiant and most rotten: the belief that enough money and will can repeat the past — and what that faith costs when the past declines to cooperate.
Fitzgerald wrote it at 28 on the French Riviera, convinced it would be his masterpiece. It sold poorly — under 25,000 copies in his lifetime — and he died believing himself a failure. Armed-services editions distributed to WWII soldiers revived it; it now sells half a million copies a year and sits near the top of every list of great American novels.
- 01
The green light
Literature's most famous symbol — the dock light Gatsby reaches toward — anchors a meditation on hope that outruns its object.
- 02
New money, old money, no money
West Egg, East Egg, and the Valley of Ashes map American class with brutal geometric clarity — the Buchanans' 'vast carelessness' is the book's true villain.
- 03
The unreliable golden summer
Nick claims to be the most honest person he knows; watch what he chooses not to see. The narration is its own puzzle.
- 04
The past is not even past
'Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!' — Gatsby's creed, and the novel's tragic engine.
Gatsby tosses his English shirts — apricot, coral, faint orange — into a rainbow heap while Daisy buries her face in them and sobs, 'I've never seen such beautiful shirts before.' Longing, displaced onto fabric, in one perfect scene.
The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg — a fading optometrist's billboard — stare over the Valley of Ashes like an absent god watching the industrial wasteland between mansions and Manhattan.
