Okay, the topic has been trailed, I think by EmmaD, so does anyone fancy mixing it on the subject of Gatsby's greatness or otherwise? I'll come clean - when I first read the book I loved it, but rereading it a few years later, I disliked it. Teaching it to A level students, I came to loathe it. But maybe that's just a problem with teaching - or me teaching, at any rate. Of course, I might read it tomorrow and love it again.
Here's an idea for what it's worth. Nick Carraway is drunk more or less constantly through the book, and Fitzgerald leaves clues to this here and there. But I suppose that's one of the good things about it. What I don't like is the 'next week we're going to put in the symbols' aspect of it, and the desperation to produce a classic work in competition with the high priests of modernism.
There you go. Flame away!

Joe (wearing tin helmet on head and sitting on a steel hubcap)

<Added>

Erm, what's all this 'report this thread' stuff? He aint gonna sue me, is he? Fitzgerald, I mean.

Joe

Do you think Nick's drunk all the time (well, most of them are) because Fitzgerald was?

I read Gatsby at about 15, and again a couple of years ago, and was knocked out by it both times, but for completely different reasons.

Emma

I've done without reading Gatsby or whatever it's called and it hasn't done me any harm. Who is this Fitzgerald man anyway?

Emma - I've sometimes thought that it was like a coded, quiet cry for help, so yes. But my chief reasons are in the text. I'm pretty sure that 'Carraway' is an indirect reference to the use of carraway seed to disguise the smell of alcohol on the breath - see Joyce's story 'Counterparts', where it's used in this way. I guess that Mr F was aware of the trick, and aware of the story - so it's kind of an 'intertextual' reference. Then there's the hallucinatory quality of some scenes - partly due to the Trimalchio extravagance of Gatsby's parties, but also due to control of Nick's point of view; and also when he comes home and thinks the houses are on fire. Then there's the bit where Nick says something like he's only been drunk twice in his life - yeh, and the rest, I think he doth protest too much. When he says this, he's been through a classic alcohol fugue state (it seems to me).

But it's the name above all - disguising the addiction is embodied in Carraway's name, so the whole text can be viewed with a hint of suspicion about reliability and all that. Maybe someone else has ideas on that?

Joe (lurching out of teacher mode)

Traveller, it's called The Great Gatsby, and features at or near the top when lists of all-time great novels are compiled. What would you have, as they say.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is an American writer, whose name is often associated, unenlighteningly, with the so-called Jazz Age. Often said to have blown his talent on drink (alcohol). Of course you can live without having read him. That applies to any writer. There's no doubt in my mind that his best work will live as long as we can sit around reading books - while there's something left to sit on, to quote Zappa. But Gatsby is, in my mind, a peculiar case.

Joe

Joe, I find your comments on the Great Gatsby very interesting. I'd never even thought about it in that way. I'd be really interested in knowing what you think makes it a 'great' novel and what has disillusioned you about it since.

Ashlinn

Ashlinn - it's not easy to say, so I need to think about your question. I'll come back to you when I've got time to ponder.

Joe

I personally thought it was a lousy novel. I was bored fromstart to finish. Not much more to say about it.

Ashlinn - I've thought about this for years (and over the last week) and I still don't have an answer. I have a very strange relationship with this book. When I first read it, I was going through a hard time (details some other day) and there were four books which helped me through (this was 1972):

Confessions of an English Opium Eater (first edition) - De Quincey
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald

I've said to friends, I had to read On the Road five times before I knew its faults ...
so it's overlong acquaintance I guess, and that goes for Gatsby too. But the thing about Gatsby, for me, is Fitzgerald is trying too hard to be great. But I think I love it really ... I should be so good!

Joe

Joe

<Added>

I see I haven't answered your question about what I think makes it great ... well, I guess it chimed with me because it hit me at a time when I ...

No, it's a mystery. Sorry.

well, I guess it chimed with me because it hit me at a time when I ...

It's salutary for us as writers to realise that some of what makes our writing resonate for someone is not much to do with us, and everything to do with them.

We all sit round arguing to try and persuade each other why something is (or isn't) a good book, but actually our decision about it, like yours, Joe, is not at all rational, but a gut thing. We try and rationalise it: if it's Gatsby, 'I just can't be bothered with all those rich people' or 'nothing happens' or 'but the writing's so wonderful' or 'but it's the way it creeps up on you that Nick's an unreliable narrator'.

But actually, we like it because we like it, or we don't because we don't. It's really a non-rational feeling about a not very rational experience. Maybe that's what art is.

Emma

Absolutely - it defies explanation much of the time. Some of the most moving poetry I know is in traditional ballads and songs, and some of the most mysterious too. It speeds straight to some part of the unconscious and BAM! your hair goes up, your spine tingles ... And no-one knows who wrote it, very often, so there's no thinking 'I ought to like this because X write it and everyone tells me she/he is a great writer'.

Joe

Somerset Maugham I think it was who said that the test of true poetry (as opposed to verse) was that if he remembered a line while he was shaving, he cut himself. Leaves out 51% of the human race, of course, but it's not otherwise a bad test!

Music's the best example, maybe, because it has nothing to 'understand', in one sense. Straight into the synapses and out through the prickling skin.

Emma

What's great about Gatsby is that it shows in such a poignant way that money can never be an adequate substitute for love. Daisy tells Gatsby that, 'Rich girls don't marry poor boys,' so he becomes rich, but he's still a poor boy in her eyes and the mansion and the parties can never fill the hole inside him.

Larissa.

Agreed, Larissa. And how about the notion that the love of others can never be an adequate substitute for self-love? Just an idea.

Ashlinn

Ashlinn, I agree, but that's a different novel! It could be one in which we see Jay on the couch talking about his early years with Mr and Mrs Gatz. Personally, I think TGG is stronger for us not knowing too much about that; the reader can project themselves into the space.

Anyway, surely even people who love themselves want romantic partners.

Larissa.