Is The Great Gatsby Truly a Must-Read?

Every couple months, a sentence like "Classic books to read" or "Best books of all time" enters my Google search box, bringing up pages of blog posts, podcasts, and Goodreads articles filled with books that are deemed “worthwhile.” And nearing the top of every collection I look at, The Great Gatsby is there -- right at the top. In all honesty, it's highly annoying to see Gatsby sitting there time and time again, crying out to be read. So, partially in an effort to make the ever-present Gatsby disappear from my sight forever, I decided to oblige the pleadings of Providence, and picked up the story last week. Here are my thoughts.

An overall enthralling book, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is set in the Roaring Twenties, and tells of events and perspectives that are rarely considered today. From bustling parties to unfaithful spouses, the themes of this book manage to be instructive, realistic, and startling all at once. This book tells the tale of several young people and their respective trials, financial situations, and romances, while simultaneously emphasizing themes such as the implications of dishonesty.

Before I finished the book, I believed it to be extraordinarily bland and generic -- a classic “Rags to Riches” tale. However, upon completing the story, my perspective was thoroughly reversed. I now consider it to be one of the most unique stories I have ever read, for the simple fact that every detail, relationship, and situation holds tremendous weight, and returns later in the story. This creates a thoroughly comprehensive and enthralling whirlwind of characters, motives, and relationships, all of which are written in a style that emulates that of Agatha Christie.

To my own great surprise, I now believe F. Scott Fitzgerald to be one of the most articulate authors I have read. Throughout his various works, his inspiring and intimidating vocabulary and talent are showcased. His creative arguments are complex and comprehensive, compelling the mind to ponder the true meaning of his statements, while entertaining the imagination at the same time.

While I would not classify The Great Gatsby as a Classic overall, I would heartily recommend it to any reader with a spare afternoon or two. It would be best to attempt to finish the book in one or two sittings for the best comprehension, since details are fairly important and the dull parts are…well, dull. Additionally, this story would make a fantastic read-aloud, but I’d recommend it for reasonably mature audiences due to several heavy themes — adultery, accidents, and murder.

“And now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“He reads deep books with long words in them.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if by ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city out line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repealed by the inexhaustible variety of life.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced -- or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irritable prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believe in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Angry, half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifter fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald