Required reading:
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

By Justin Wymer
St. Albans High School

In “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Yale alumni and bond salesman Nick Carraway, chronicles the intricate, unraveling character of Jay Gatsby — a neighbor consumed by his lovelorn past.

The book begins with Carraway describing his mediocre life and the culture in which he is immersed. He lives in a modest house with an unkempt lawn that’s comparatively shabby to his neighbors’ homes. The residents of West Egg, an outcropping of Long Island, are a lavish sort with tailored suits, expensive dinner parties and gleaming cars. But no one is as showy as Gatsby, Nick’s next-door neighbor, an Oxford grad and owner of a multi-tiered mansion.

Without ever having formally met him, Nick is invited by Gatsby’s servant to attend one of Gatsby’s famed parties. These galas are held continually by Gatsby for strangers who gorge on his hospitality and leave without thanking or even meeting him. Nick is both appalled and compelled by such fiends. He finds them morally corrupt but undeniably interesting.

As Nick gets to know Gatsby better, he discovers that Gatsby’s identity is a façade. He’s not an Oxford grad — he attended the school for a few short months, unable to return home after being in the war. He did not gain affluence through bond or stock trade — he’s rich because he’s an apt bootlegger.

Gatsby has accumulated and flaunted his fortune because he is in love with Nick’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and has been since before he went to war. His mansion is across the bay from Daisy, who is now a married mother with a life on East Egg.

Gatsby has spent his years harboring his undying love, orchestrating parties in hopes that Daisy might show. When that doesn’t happen he stages a reunion, and after that, he and Daisy begin an affair. Gatsby wants nothing more than for Daisy to say she never loved her husband, that she was in love with Gatsby all along.

Obviously, things go awry, and the story ends in a deception, three deaths and a two-car funeral procession.

Besides an interesting plot, Fitzgerald embellishes this book with beautiful prose, startling observations and embedded symbolism. He writes in a pithy, poetic style that is largely descriptive of nature. His words ring of insight and grave realization of fate, but they quickly progress as a storyline, too.

But perhaps the surest reason that “The Great Gatsby” has endured as an American classic is because it vividly portrays the crumbling of the American dream.

Nick is an example of someone caught in the web of the rich and famous. All his fortunate friends sought this American dream full of wonder, hope and promised wealth, and many of them found it. The difference is that Nick, although he knows he is grouped with these ritzy people, finds himself seeking a happiness he can’t find in such a prodigal way of life.

He is one of many who would later become disillusioned, unpeeling the lies of the past to embrace a new world. At one point in the novel, Nick says, “It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”

These words ring true today and resound in the hearts of thousands of readers.