Last Page of The Great Gatsby (1997)

http://home.sprynet.com/~eric/Gatsby.htm

by samclemens • 9 years ago

87 30 9 years ago

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aliston• 9 years ago

I love the Great Gatsby and I was surprised that there was a second level of understanding that comes from how it changed through the versions. There is an early version of The Great Gatsby in print called "Trimalchio: An Early Version of 'The Great Gatsby'", which includes some interesting changes.

One of my favorite lines that made it into the recent movie but is not in the regular print version:

I'm only 32… I might still be a great man if I could only forget that I once lost Daisy. But my life, old sport, my life has got to be like this… It's got to keep going up.

Andrex• 9 years ago

I had no idea that line wasn't in the book! It's one of the best in the entire movie. Crazy.

(Despite all the pomp and glitz, that version is one of my favorite movies.)

schizoidboy• 9 years ago

Is it fair to say that a major theme in The Great Gatsby is the decadence of rich people? If so, I don't understand why so many people seem to like the book, non-ironically, for the parties and the glamour. Am I missing something?

valuearb• 9 years ago

Yes.

colanderman• 9 years ago

Same with Downton Abbey. A lot of fans seem drawn to the opulent castles and hordes of servants but one of the themes of the show is the disappearance of these things due to their innate incestuous purposelessness. The main characters only barely hang on to their lifestyle by increasingly embracing the ascendance of the middle-class.

smacktoward2• 9 years ago

Oh, man. The looks I've gotten when people asked me what I thought of *Downton Abbey," and I told them I was rooting for someone to burn the place down...

caoilte• 9 years ago

Well it was written by Julian Fellowes and that is what he is obsessed with.

beters• 9 years ago

The appeal of the party scenes in The Great Gatsby is, although it appears glamorous and perfect, Fitzgerald shows us that it's like any party we've attended.

Take this excerpt for instance: "We were at a particularly tipsy table. Gatsby had been called to the phone and I'd enjoyed these same people only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now."

Tell me you haven't had this feeling about someone. The party scenes are relatable to people in all levels of wealth.

lovemenot• 9 years ago

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

david927• 9 years ago

When I heard Baz Luhrmann was going to direct an adaptation a few years ago, I had to laugh. It was clear from his style of direction that it would be extol the glamour and miss the entire point of the book -- and it did.

You're not missing anything. Reading a book and understanding it are two very different things.

smacktoward2• 9 years ago

No, you're just an observant enough reader to be able to see past the text of the work and appreciate the subtext.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtext

Lots of people aren't, so it's not uncommon to see people whose appreciation of some works never gets beyond the surface level.

And sometimes they're so inattentive that even the text itself is lost on them. My standard example of that is Bruce Springsteen's song "Born in the USA," which is widely understood (in America, anyway) as a bombastic, "we're number one!" patriotic anthem, played at political rallies and sports events and the like. If you pay attention to the actual lyrics (http://www.elyrics.net/read/b/bruce-springsteen-lyrics/born-...), however, it's clearly a song about how the American system screws the little guy. But most people don't listen beyond the upbeat, poppy chorus, so they miss Springsteen's entire point.

pasquinelli• 9 years ago

it's easy to do with song. another good example is "excitable boy" by warren zevon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4-pexSVWzM

toyg• 9 years ago

Same with Neil Young's "Keep on rockin' in the free world", Dire Straits' "Money for nothing", and other songs even in other languages.

Personally, I've soured on the idea of being ironic in songs. Most people will miss the irony, they only listen to the catchy chorus, and more often than not, the lines you meant as absurd will be proudly paraded by the same people you were mocking. Take the recent "We the people" by A Tribe Called Quest: the chorus, taken alone, is a bigots' anthem on a catchy tune; I bet it will soon become a mainstay at neonazi rallies and the likes.

chris_wot2• 9 years ago

No, you aren't missing anything. The Marissa Meyers of the world are the ones missing the point entirely. And like Gatsby, it usually ends in disaster.

innocentoldguy• 9 years ago

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

harry8• 9 years ago

The palace of Versaille is beautiful and has been kept by the French despite the decadence that created it (eg "let them eat cake") leading to the revolution where such decadent were killed with a guillotine.

buzzybee2• 9 years ago

I think there are at least three or four things that keep Gatsby compelling:

* The prose style keeps a consistent balance of fluid/grounded and imaginative the whole way through. It's nowhere near as "sticky" as other literary novels, which can force you to grind down on each sentence to get at the meaning.

* The storytelling, at its surface, relates to self-absorbed goals that people connect with as fans automatically. When people are fans of something, that's basically down to them liking the characters, setting, and specific scenes or scenarios, not the hard details of the plotting or any subtextual stuff. "Everyone is here to indulge their kink" applies to pretty much any media, and here the kink is clearly "the American Dream as ostentatious wealth". If the novel were focused on Jay Gatsby's hard-striving bootlegging days, or if it concluded with a sudden turn to frugality and Puritan ethics, it would never be as popular.

* The aspects of the book that are ordinary and humanizing of the characters act to make them even more relatable than a book that tried to make them worthy of their wealth. Gatsby's version of the American Dream, besides involving a very performative version of wealth, contains a mythologized, Icarus-like aspiration to ever greater ambitions. Nick Carraway is there primarily as an observer of events, and only occasionally a participant, and in fact gradually withdraws from his own aspirations over the course of the book - making him a great self-insert for the middle-class reader who would like to believe themselves better than the rich, while simultaneously indulging in the luxury aesthetics.

yarou• 9 years ago

I still can't believe the people who defend Daisy's character. She's literally the definition of an evil human being.

voidhorse• 9 years ago

Man, I really have to re-read the Great Gatsby.

It's ridiculous it's assigned as high school level reading. Yes the prose is appropriate for high school understanding, and the base themes are comprehensible enough, but man, the entire subject matter of this book largely revolves around scenarios, concepts, and behaviors one usually doesn't become aware of, or have any direct experience of, until adulthood.

Worse still, forcing students to read the book in high-school/ end of junior high probably just turns them off from it, or leads them to falsely feel like its not worth as much as it actually is because so much of it is attuned to adult experiences teenagers can't quite sync up with yet, even if they were born into a rich family or use the fullest powers of their imagination.

There's a tremendous gulf between the social landscapes of adults and those of children. (Though you could perhaps argue part of the point is to maybe show this isn't the case--nonetheless, I think certain things defy comprehension until we've experienced them ourselves, or until we've at least encountered sufficient analogues or had enough time to synthesize a variety of other proxy experiences into an equivalent)

xahrepap• 9 years ago

I have no interest in reading the book... because of exactly this: I had to read sophomore year of highschool, it was boring, left me with no desire to read it. And I could never understand why my teacher loved it so much.

douche• 9 years ago

Like most supposed "classics"of english literature that high school students are saddled with, it's largely a steaming pile, particularly if you are coerced into attempting to find meaning in it as a raw fifteen-year-old. I'm not sure it's any good, rereading it now in my late 20s, to be honest. It's hard to find anything from my HS AP literature course that I'd use for anything but tinder these days.

ikeyany• 9 years ago

I'm trying to figure out if that is a flaw, or an inherent feature, of our educational system (assuming you went to high school in the US).

appleiigs• 9 years ago

I was thinking the same thing (your entire comment) today, even before running across this thread.

My bloomberg terminal has daily quote when you log in. Today it says "I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody" - Hebert Bayard Swope. I didn't know Swope so I googled. Wikipedia says Swope could be partial inspiration for Gatsby (at least the house and parties).

I read the book in early junior high school and I remembered it to be a book about nothing. Just a guy who missed a girl and that's it. In addition to not relating to the social and personal experience aspect, I really didn't notice the writing style which people gush about. Will need to re-read for sure.

Last Page of The Great Gatsby (1997)

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