Great Gatsby #1

This week, I was able to get my hands on and read one of the Great American book classics of the 1920s: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. From what I had heard from other people, The Great Gatsby was a book based around an eccentric yet benevolent millionaire in New York named Gatsby who has a mysterious past behind him that no one really knows the whole truth towards. This description, given to me by family and friends alike, made the book sound almost like a murder mystery, which was sort of the main reason I decided to pick it up. The other reason I decided to pick it up was because of its relatively recent setting of 1920s America (unlike Dickens and his 19th century England where every tree branch and corn field has a backstory that must be written in the story because he was paid by the word). That’s also a reason why I like Fitzgerald more than most of the Great American authors, he’s one of the more recent ones, making his books more relevant to modern day society than any other.

However, not everything people tell you is one hundred percent true. While Jay Gatsby is said to have a mysterious past and multiple rumors are spread about his past that all offer different theories on it, it’s not really delved into as much by the book’s central character, Nick, as if it were a part of the mystery genre. Rather, the book seems to focus on an enigmatic love “triangle” with Nick taking  an observational first-person point of view on the whole situation. Then there was the sentence structure. The structure of the vast majority of each sentence that involved multiple people’s dialogue were very cryptic to the point where a person could easily lose track of who was talking and when early on in the book. Unfortunately, it was so cryptic for me that I lost track of most of the explanations supporting the plot of the book and left me unsatisfied, as if all of the time I had spent reading had done nothing and had helped accomplish nothing for me. Because of this, I will be rereading the entire book over again to make sure nothing is overlooked.