The Great Gatsby
Literature is an art that can only be comprehensible when you find fascination in it and when you are capable of seeing beyond the horizon. Although it isn’t easy to comprehend literary works without working under someone’s supervision, I tried to absorb the context of this beautifully written book as much as I could.
The Initial Part
In the initial parts of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick shares the advice of his father and thus, as he says — he became the man who had reserved all his judgements that helped him in meeting fascinating people, who shared their stories because they had had the satisfaction of not getting judged, but Nick also complains of enduring the boring creatures due to his same habit.
The Protest
The narrator also protests against the accusation he became the victim of in his college days
In the following part, he quotes, “I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon — for the intimate revelation of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppression.”
He felt a familiar feeling of privy that forced him to feign slumber, preoccupation or being jokingly hurtful to avoid getting indulge in the same matters he had been in.
“Intimate revelation” points out the secrets of young men or the ways are copied in which they convey their feelings due to the pressure of society that snatches their own ways of feeling and sharing things, thus the society spoils their inherent ways, and as much as Nick loathes the natures of affluent people, he wants to appreciate the same luxuries in his life, as he places books of banking on his book-shelf.
The story narrator depicts the character of Gatsby as a gorgeous man whose gestures had the generosity he couldn’t find in well-to-do people. In the first chapter, the author says, “What foul dust floated in the wake of his (Gatsby’s) dreams that temporarily closed out my (the story teller’s) interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
These lines are indicating at the dreams of Gatsby, who wanted his name to be in the book of wealthy people of the society — to have his love back he couldn’t have due to poverty that the author represented with the word “dust” that obscured Gatsby’s vision and he forgot his self-originality, thus this makes his intimate friend forget the sorrows and happiness of the other men.
There’s another quote that I liked is, “life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.” This captivating utterance, as I believe, reveals how things look when you behold them from one side can be different if you behold them from the other. A coin has two sides as well as a person can have two faces, but you only get to know when you let your senses work unaffectedly.
The character of the lost love at so many points of the book shows the dominance of men and the freedom they get. As Gatsby’s dusty dream quoted, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
Here it is conspicuous that she was compelled to live her life with a man who had found his interest in another woman, and she (Gatsby’s dusty dream) had nothing that could have worked for her. She thinks that if she were a fool, she wouldn’t have known anything about her husband’s fraudulence, thus shows the patriarchal influence.
It’s congenial to admit that this writer has captured my mind by his way of depicting the events. As in the novella, author’s story teller of the book says, “He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and as far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.”
Gatsby’s stretching out his arms toward a green light alludes to his desires for unreachable objects — the desires of uncommon men for the common things.
I completed reading this novel on November third but had to read so many lines again in order to comprehend the context.
