Braddy Reads The Great Gatsby

As a student of literature, I'm a bit of a poser. Remember, English has always been my favorite subject. I was in the advanced placement English and literature programs all through junior high and high school. I MAJORED in English in college. And yet here I am, 28 years old, and I've just now finished The Great Gatsby for the first time.

Put away your pitchforks, though, and just listen a minute.

Even though F. Scott Fitzgerald's most well-known book is a staple of high school English programs and has been probably since it was written, I never had the opportunity to read The Great Gatsby. That said, I've long been familiar with the plot of the book. In college I took a course on literary theory that applied several different schools of analysis to the plot of Gatsby, the one book they assumed everyone had read. So I was very familiar already, not only with the plot of the book, but with what everything means.

Tangentially, I remember from the class that there's totally an argument to be made for every character in The Great Gatsby being gay, but I think it really just boils down to how manly Jordan dresses and the fact that Nick at one point says Gatsby's clothes are "gorgeous."

The opening chapters to The Great Gatsby are some of the most beautifully-written passages I've ever encountered. Fitzgerald knows how to turn a phrase - the guy's an excellent writer. I missed a lot of the well-crafted prose as the plot drove on, but maybe I was getting too wrapped up in the plot to pay attention to it. Fitzgerald's got a good ear for dialog, too. His attempts to mimic accents and dialects (à la Mark Twain) is a bit painful, but, otherwise, the dialog sounds real, believable.

Oh, and the final sentence of the book? "So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past." That's darn good stuff.

As a condemnation of its era, The Great Gatsby works brilliantly. Contemporary authors can find a lot to like in the writing style, which is fluid, clear, and effortless. I imagine a lot of the themes are difficult for high school kids to relate to - themes about trying (and failing) to recapture the past don't have a lot of resonance with people who don't have much of a past to capture.

Plus, now that I've read Gatsby, these comics make a lot more sense.