Personally, aside from Russian literature, I now prefer American literature, which I think is underestimated in China. I really like that film adaptation, but what the film expresses is something else, not the same as the novel’s core theme.
My own understanding is that American literature has at least three themes that are very distinctive and different from Europe(or other countries). One is the depiction of desolation and human loneliness before the American continent was developed into a prosperous land. Another is the pursuit of the American Dream, where people achieve success through relentless struggle. The third is what this novel expresses: what happens after success? Money and career cannot solve all problems; people need more to fill an entire life.
I think this kind of contradiction is expressed most clearly in American literature and is also most worth articulating within the American cultural context. This is because its commodity economy and social transformation have been too successful, and it lacks the kind of historical entanglements that Europe has to dilute these problems. As a result, this sense of emptiness stands out even more sharply and demands a more urgent response.
I don’t know if there are horror films like this, but I once saw something similar in the TV series WandaVision. She creates an illusion in which she and Vision are a standard middle-class couple, well-fed and well-clothed, with the visuals in black and white. This made it feel like a horror story to me. Why? Because you feel as if they lack nothing, yet they seem like empty shells: their lives are filled with commodities, and all their actions seem stripped of a spiritual dimension.
Of course, I don’t think that America’s secular success means it has no spiritual world; rather, the former has been so successful that the latter has been greatly neglected. The purpose of American literature should be to depict, under the success of this commodity economy, what people’s inner lives have actually become, and what they ought to pursue. This, to me, is its most distinctive quality.
Though no longer pertinent explicitly, the original sin of America is a potent literary force. We still feel it's sting in our African American literature nearly axiomatically. Almost by definition, any southern gothic literature will revolve around the effects of slavery, which includes some of our greatest novels.
Per the Great Gatsby, the story itself is one of the most powerful arcs out there: The Hero arc with a disillusionment ending. It's not exactly a negative change arc for the protagonist (Nick), but it's meant to feel like one. Nick is physically better off than he starts out, but his opinions and feelings about the world at large are negative. He has grown up, fought the dragon, healed the sick king, beaten the bully, encouraged the coward, and gotten the damsel. But Fitzgerald adeptly makes them all hollow. It's a great and quick read. A really tight plot and good prose.
Yes. I’ve probably only read Gone with the Wind and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Still, it feels like a fair share of American novels touch on this theme to varying degrees.
There are some subtleties in Gatsby that most people miss, and isn't even addressed in the article.
Jay Gatsby (James Gatz) is probably Jewish.
Nick Carraway is probably gay, but at least bisexual.
Both of these traits forced people into lower castes this era in high-status society. To me the lens of the book is repeatedly the failure of "if only I can win them over" slowly becoming the unsatisfying "these people were always assholes." Whether it's parties, a potential spouse, or important friends, the entire concept of class structure is poison. If people are good people, it shouldn't matter how they present themselves... that's just what I've always taken away from it. It seems like a theme that someone with Fitzgerald's background would want to convey, especially someone with that background who enjoined the company of people like Hemingway. And I think that's been a theme of American culture since reconstruction.
I've read thousands of books. There are good novels everywhere, and no country has the exclusivity of any theme.
> One is the depiction of desolation and human loneliness before the American continent was developed into a prosperous land.
Of course, classical European literature didn't focus on the American wilderness.
Though the most famous book on this theme is probably Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. And I enjoyed T.E. Lawrence' Seven Pillars of Wisdom which most people know through the film; the Arabian desert was a good place for loneliness in the wilderness.
> Another is the pursuit of the American Dream, where people achieve success through relentless struggle.
Like wise, the American Dream is an American myth, which is rarely the focus outside of the USA. But searching success through relentless struggle is a frequent theme. For instance, Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir or Maupassant's Bel-ami. These are from two of the most famous classical French authors, but there are many novels about hard-working people that reach success.
> The third is what this novel expresses: what happens after success? Money and career cannot solve all problems; people need more to fill an entire life.
As you like Russian literature, I suppose you've read Goncharov's Oblomov and Chekov's theater, especially Uncle Vania. That theme is central in one of the most famous French novel, Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The excellent Italian writer Alberto Moravia also has many novels about this, the most famous being Il disprezzo and my favourite being Gli indifferenti. I also like D'Annunzio's Il piacere much more than The Great Gatsby. I would argue that variations of this theme are universal, with old writings like the Bibles's Qohelet and even more Sumer's Gilgamesh.
I think what you said makes a lot of sense, and my earlier comment wasn’t very rigorous. More accurately, the most interesting thing about the United States is that it has almost stripped away all other influencing factors—no deep history, no influence from classical literature. If we set aside the atrocities committed against the Native Americans, it’s as if the country started from an untouched, resource-rich continent and rapidly evolved into the most advanced capitalist society. This makes the contrast between material wealth and the spiritual world especially stark and easy to observe.
Balzac is quite fantastic. And also not great for you if you have too much empathy for the characters but decide to read 10 of his books/stories in a row.
I know Zola, but I don't know why I haven't read his works yet. Just by reading the introduction, I know I would probably love all his works. Maybe it's because I've been reading more history and less fiction in recent years.
As a Chinese-American, in my humble opinion the Great Gatsby is the 1920's version of "On the Road", "American Psycho" and "Liar's Poker". In another words, it is about the American spirit to chase money/success/glamour in spite of the protagonist's preconceived understanding that doing so would end up ultimately futile and empty.
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgasmic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." IMHO, the green light is the dopamine rush of the American spirit.
Your notion of the American inner life that it somehow does exists I agree with but it is imho a far cry from stereotypical notion of inner life of quiet contemplation, familial and communal obligation in the European or Chinese manner. You can look no further than in this forum where people talk about accumulating material wealth whether by pursuing a well-paid tech job at a BigTech company or raising money or bootstrapping as an "indie". And people here will have read great books and understand the notions that "money do not buy happiness" or that "family is everything", but put the same people under your so-called WandaVision test of illusions of two choices - they will, 9/10 times choose a morally compromising job BigCo, business pursuit AdTech or AI Slop that favors material accumulation at the expense of true self-actualization (Gatsby vs. Nick).
IMHO the pursuit of "the green light" for the "orgasmic future" IS the American inner life, whether it be from the pioneers going West, to Italian immigrants in Brooklyn to Jersey Shore/Soprano's, to the rich Chinese Fu-Er-Dai shopping/clubbing fashion in Manhattan to the Indian immigrants going West again to switch job from WiPro to FAANG E6, the pursuit of accumulation and glamour is the inner life, dare I say "it's not even about the money" - but a spiritual pursuit of a lifetime of running to make one feel whole like Gatsby did . And that we can't help ourselves - like "boats against" rolling bubbles and crashes of the American stock markets or TikTok trends, thinking "but this time it's different", but "borne back ceaselessly" into our past selves of emptiness that we were trying to fill up with wealth and social status in the 1st place.
I recently read an American novel that gave me a deeper insight into what you were saying. I don’t know its English title, but roughly translating the Chinese title back, it’s California Gold. It’s about the son of a miner who dreams of striking it rich; step by step he becomes a wealthy man in California. The story has some moral sense, too. It was probably a very popular novel in the U.S. at one point.
But I felt the ending was rather unsatisfying, because it simply stops after he succeeds—lacking the kind of depth we usually expect from a great novel. Yet I also think that’s part of the charm of American fiction: it’s simple, rough, and fun to read. Kind of like the original Godfather novel. Of course, the deeper aspects require other literary works to explore. I haven’t read much, so I’m not sure who in America does it best—maybe Faulkner? On the Road, The Great Gatsby… I read those in college, and even after all these years, the impression they left on me is unforgettable.
> But I felt the ending was rather unsatisfying, because it simply stops after he succeeds—lacking the kind of depth we usually expect from a great novel.
I find this a lot with American TV and movies (not so much with books as I tend to read non-fiction).
Tying up all ends, sequentially and perfectly. It makes it all very unsatisfying.
I just thought of a perfect example: The Graduate. Many people like that uncertain ending—although they eloped, the camera keeps rolling, and we see them shift from initial happiness to confusion. A beautiful, simple ending is certainly nice, but an ending like this is far more unforgettable.
German filmmaker Christian Petzold often gets some flak for his ambiguous endings, but it's amusing that he actually follows European cinema tradition. It's his audience (even in Europe) that got more used to neat, fully wrapped endings from American media.
I think there’s a nuance. Chasing the low millions, and therefore financial security and comfort, is not the same as chasing billions, which would be Gatsby territory
Banality of evil. Promotion-driven/mortgage driven development. NIBMY. But don't mind me, I'm guilty of this more than most people but IMHO I think at least it's important to acknowledge the culpability of the affluent 10% people vs. the 1%. IMHO, we are worse than the 1% for enabling this society.
They don't chase money, success, or glamour. In fact, they're chasing the complete opposite of what Gatsby was chasing: spirituality. Their relationships are honest. They have no desire for money to influence.
In fact, on most spectrums, American Pyscho and On the Road are on totally opposite ends.
Sure, they share some themes like disillusionment and emptiness, but their core messages couldn't be farther apart.
Mi Mexicanito, sinceramente de este chinito, "On the Road" is imho about all about these gringo's chase for cultural/spiritual accumulation - just with beatnik fashion/prose than with a briefcase.
>Teresa (who is from Mexico/o la conquista sexual temporal de nuestro supuesto héroe en "busca de la verdad") didn’t want Sal to leave, but he told her that he had to. He had sex with Teresa in the barn his last night in the area, and the next morning Teresa brought him breakfast. They agreed to meet in New York whenever Teresa could get there, though Sal says they both knew this wouldn’t happen. Sal left and hitchhiked back to L.A., arriving in the early morning. There, he bought a bus ticket to Pittsburgh and spent most of his remaining money on food for the trip.
My reading of "On the Road" is Jack Kerouac's ultimate realization that their restless wandering is really a pursuit of narcissism of sex, jazz and drugs to fill up their empty inside. Look at the real personal lives of the Beatniks and Kerouac's later readings (e.g., Dharma Bums) for the confirmations or disconfirmations. Or look to the spiritual children of the Beatniks, the Western backpackers or the spiritual seekers to Mexico or Thailand (privileged, naive and ultimately exploitative and conformist when the chips are down).
/ My reading of On the Road is Jack Kerouac’s ultimate realization that their restless wandering is really a narcissistic chase—sex, jazz, drugs—to fill an inner void.
I don’t think the novel supports “narcissism” as a central answer that explains everything. The book is much more about restless hunger for experience and living in the moment. And jazz in particular isn’t framed as a symptom of emptiness; it functions as an aesthetic ideal that they’re trying to model their lives on.
Also, there is no ultimate realization in the book. There's ambivalence and fascination with Dean and the road, as well as increasing awareness of the costs and disappointments that life can bring, but it's not an ultimate indictment on it.
> Or look to the spiritual children of the Beatniks, the Western backpackers…
I'm not really interested in how it was interpreted later by various groups of people.
> privileged, naive and ultimately exploitative and conformist…
Conformity is neither something they desire not something they end up doing. In fact, their defining trait is the refusal of conventional stability.
Thank you for your response. My last word is one of my favorite film is "Y tu mamá También" where my favorite character de la película es Mexico, life is like foam, so give yourself away like the sea. Puedes vivir el momento, pero tu posición social es para siempre. Hope you have a great day/year.
> My own understanding is that American literature has at least three themes that are very distinctive and different from Europe... Another is ... relentless struggle
> In my limited experience of Russian literature, the struggle doesn't lead to success!
There is a meme comparing different countries’ literature:
France: “I would die for love.”
England: “I would die for honor.”
America: “I would die for freedom.”
Russia: “I will die.”
The harsh climate and scarce resources in Russia prevent it from producing something like the American Dream. People there seem to be more pessimistic.
What now??? Russia is one of the most resource-rich countries on the planet! They are just very inefficient in doing anything with it. The country and all its people should all be among the wealthiest on the planet.
The impression of Russia as a resource-rich nation didn’t really take shape until after World War II. The widespread use of oil and natural gas only spans about a century, which hasn’t been enough time to fundamentally alter the literary essence of Russia.
And USSR is really not good at produce normal goods…
Also that the "spiritual world" (i.e. religion) in America has been colonized by money, consumption and commodities as well, which has drained all the spirituality from it. Religion in America is as desolate of meaning and sustenance as the American Western Frontier. You have to be a heretic to find spirituality that's worth anything here.
Ancestral Americans really do not have a "spiritual world," in my opinion, as acquisitiveness and power games suffuse even our churches, spiritual movements, and fraternal societies. The emptiness you delineate is very integral to the long-term American experience. As a reaction, addictive and manic personalities are endemic.
You reminded me of that experiment a social media influencer did earlier. American Christian churches refused to provide her with help, but other religions did.
Those churches referred her to food pantries that were funded and operated by donations and volunteers from multiple churches.
They help people so often that there are entire subsets of organizations dedicated to different areas of need. Food, housing, disaster relief, clothing, rehab, women’s shelters.
One church in North Carolina that wasn’t involved with a local food pantry did just help her directly.
In order to ignore all that you’d almost have to think that the social media influencer was just trying to get attention…
I think the saying is "missing the forest for the trees.[1]"
Referring someone to another food bank or resource is not addressing or owning the immediate problem, which is what the experiment showed. Those organizations failed at their primary objective and instead of re-evaluating why they failed they hid behind process and procedure and how they were being tricked since it wasn't a "real" problem.
There was a proper way to handle this situation as anyone who has worked or called into customer service or tech support where their issue was addressed no matter what the internal structure of the organization was.
That sounds like a one-off anecdote. For my anecdote, when the government was shutdown and people on food stamps needed help, I counted 8 churches in my neighborhood serving meals to an influx of people, which aligns with my experience throughout my entire life. Maybe some churches don't help people as much as they should, but that seems to go against a core philosophy of the church and my experience with dozens of churches across America.
> Because you feel as if they lack nothing, yet they seem like empty shells: their lives are filled with commodities, and all their actions seem stripped of a spiritual dimension.
This is exactly the situation I am in. I really really don't know what to do.
I am always a strong advocate of doing volunteer/nonprofit work.
Folks on HN have some truly valuable skills that could make a huge difference. NPO work also brings together passionate, like-minded people. It’s an automatic community.
For me, I often have similar feelings. However, I have enjoyed reading since I was a child, so I usually know how to pass the time. There are countless excellent works, both novels and nonfiction, that one could never finish reading.
Figure out what is important to you. Just listen and don't force it. Don't feel guilty or shameful of where you are; it's ok. Be present in your feelings including the difficult ones.
From the perspective of an otaku, that's an ironic conclusion. The confusion regarding the neglected interiority was a conscious decision by the mainstream in the beginning was it not?
That's perhaps not to say that the otaku lifestyle as is today is preferable, but it always more about the transcendent experiences they were reaching for, an activity labelled childish by their peers. Meaning was never an issue, just actualization.
While I'm not an American, I read a bit of American literature, and sometimes I feel that many American children/teenagers are exposed to the classics slightly early, before they can accurately pick up nuances, understand the social structure of the setting, and are able to grasp the different strengths and foibles of human beings, both real and fictional.
This tends to make them either misunderstand the text, read it literally, or just get bored of books in general. On one hand, I admire the fact that great books are read by young people (something which isn't true in my country), but I wonder whether it ends up being counterproductive.
Adaptations running away from the main story to focus overtly on stuff that attracts the audience instead of being faithful to the crux of the source material doesn't help either.
I think it’s probably counterproductive. It’s like religion - there’s arguably a lot to be gained from it, but people form negative early experiences and associate them with the thing itself. I’d love to re-read The Great Gatsby but dont want to relive middle school.
I think it's intentional. Going back and rereading both 1984 and Brave New World as an adult made me realize how awful my english teachers' interpretations ("fantastic dystopias" instead of "mirrors of then-current society") had been. Give them to kids who don't have the life experience to interpret them for themselves, and you can make people believe they know what Orwell and Huxley were writing about...
Its different for different children. Some of them understand more than you think, most of them dont.
I think that reading the classics can be beneficial to the first type. But some of the classics can be very bleak. Its not fair to the children to make them read those. 1984 is probably in this category. Read Animal Farm instead. It is also better for the second type of children.
If done properly, and in moderation, I think reading classics is beneficial.
> Going back an rereading ... made me realize how awful my english teachers' interpretations ...
Consider that a final lesson. Both about how much you've changed since high school, and about the career-ending downside to teaching kids that current society already is pretty damn dystopian.
I completely agree. To this day it still drives me crazy that people think Animal Farm is about communism being bad, instead of what it was trying to warn us about authoritarianism and propaganda.
Morris has written some of my favorite long-form New York Times pieces, ("Willie Nelson's Long Encore", "Aretha Franklin Had Power. Did We Truly Respect It?", ), and he has the novelist Min Jin Lee and Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, as guests on the podcast to talk about why they regularly re-read Gatsby.
Min Jin Lee talks about how amazing the craft of the novel is (beyond the obvious greatness of the sentence-by-sentence writing).
A couple of months ago I was in New York and found a new cyberpunk re-telling of Gatsby called Local Heavens. A fun read if you like Fitzgerald, or re-imaginings of famous novels, or cyberpunk.
No wonder Gatsby is frequently misunderstood: Most people won't have the experience needed to understand it until they're in their 30s, but we prescribe it for high schoolers year after year.
I suppose you could argue that it is a great book in terms of style and prose, which is why kids should be introduced to the work. I did not grow up in the US, so I have only first read it as a young adult and I vividly remember that the book was beautifully written. It was a joy to read, which I cannot say about all classics.
The article underlines that what you get out of Gatsby will change substantially with age, and even encourages a re-reading later to get a different understanding of the novel.
If a teenager’s understanding of it is ‘wrong’ according to you, that’s precisely the point. Perhaps the blame should be cast on a teacher’s poor explanation of it?
I had similar questions regarding middle/high school literature studies. So many, so many ideas were out of reach from my soul when I was 15 (say the social contract by Rousseau). But maybe that was just emotional/existential immaturity on my part. Maybe some pupils, arguably a few, really had the maturity to connect with these themes. Maybe also, previous generations were more mature early on. I believe that in mathematics, in the 70s, it was expected to learn abstract algebra in high school, it college.
I think this is true of much of the traditional high school English curriculum. I was way ahead of most of my peers and still far too great an idiot to fully appreciate the novels we read. I have reread some of those classics as an adult and should probably read more of them.
The skill american high schools actually teach is to confidently misunderstand the thing in ways that conform to current trends. I still remember the absolutely outrageous hot takes about The Divine Comedy that were taken seriously and encouraged by our Lit teacher.
I always enjoyed D’Angelo Barksdale’s interpretation from The Wire:
> D’Angelo: "He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it—all that shit matters. Like at the end of the book, you know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right? You can say you’re somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are, and what happened before is what really happened.
> And it don’t matter that some fool say he different ’cause the only thing that make him different is that he say it. But it ain’t the truth. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did. And because he wasn't willing to get real with the story, it caught up to him."
> Inmate: "So you're saying he couldn't get over?"
> D’Angelo: "No, I’m saying he was who he was. They found him out. They found him out in the end. And that’s what it is. You can’t get over. You can’t even get out."
I am in (perhaps) a tiny minority in that I love American literature but just don’t get what the fuss is about The Great Gatsby. I just don’t think it’s that good a novel. Off the top of my head I could come up with a list of at least 10 American novels that I have read that I think are significantly superior.
In no order here goes
1. Blood meridian
2. The Bell Jar
3. Of Mice and Men
4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s gonna say “Gravity’s Rainbow” but I think since this is an explicitly American list, the themes of Mason and Dixon of the North/South divide etc put it more squarely on this list)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Moby Dick (I’m not the biggest fan of this actually but it’s way better than Gatsby for me)
7. Walden (Does this count? Anyway whatever. Walden)
8. Portrait of a Lady
9. Infinite Jest
10. Go tell it on the mountain
Honestly this is right off the top of my head and looking back I haven’t even got any Hemingway on here, or Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. I could make a case for Slaughterhouse 5 or Catch-22 or The Naked and the Dead or a bunch of other things. Like even though I think he’s a total tool, Bonfire of the Vanities probably has a good case for being on the list
I just genuinely don’t get the fuss about Gatsby. I’m glad people like it, but there seem far, far better American novels.
Edit to add: And yes I did read it. Twice in fact, once in my late teens after I had read a lot of serious literature and thought it was ok but not great and then again in my late 30s because I was sure I must have missed something and was very disappointed to come to the conclusion that I really hadn’t.
I have two theories for why maybe people like it so much. Firstly, because the author is such a stylist and they get strung along by some of the prose. But when you read a truly jawdropping stylist like for example in my book Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Cormac Macarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald really doesn’t stand well in that company.
Second theory (perhaps cynical) is that it’s the first novel in the US school syllabus that gets really serious literary criticism applied to it and so for a lot of people it is the book that awakens them to the power of literature. I could totally see that if you had a really great teacher introducing you to proper literature by means of the book you might love the experience and, because of that, the book.
I never really understood Infinite Jest, and I've tried to read it several times over the past couple of decades. I don't really get on with the "wacky wacky wacky" nonsense humour, and the constant sesquipedalian polysyllablism in every incongruent sentence makes it read like it was written by a smartarse 14-year-old who has just found they can look up long words in a thesaurus and thinks it makes them sound clever.
It's hard work to read with no payoff, I guess unless you like endless drivelling descriptions of drug use, which I don't.
Tangentially, if you enjoy The Great Gatsby, you might also enjoy All The King's Men, which is a work of fiction that I think similarly richly described a swath of the American experience.
As for Gatsby, I think it's a great piece of fiction that invites a lot of readings, and everyone's invited to that ownership of the text. I think you can come away with the deeply shallow understanding of "the twenties were cool," and still be enriched by Fitzgerald's writing style.
I don't think anyone has made a good film adaptation of Gatsby and I don't know if anyone will, as long as it's adapted literally. The imagery and iconography of wealthy 1920s America eats so much of anything that tries to adapt it, that they tend to come out feeling shallow, and the writing is so dense that dialogue feels stilted and weird spoken out loud. You'd either need to, in my opinion, lean heavily into both, or abandon both, to make a good adaptation (leaning into both immediately feels like a Wes Anderson movie to me).
I think the best adaptation would be to do something like Jobs, where they just take a few scenes from the book and create a movie out of that.
I think the 2013 movie unfortunately has made the book into the symbol of the roaring 1920s era, and that comes with a lot of baggage that Fitzgerald didn’t intend to put center stage. I can’t think of any other mainstream media that is also set in the 20s and has as big of a cultural pull. So everything 1920s related gets crammed into Gatsby, when in reality it’s more of a fable on American identity.
That's odd. The date on the article is now April 10, 2025. In the text it refers to the publication date of The Great Gatsby as being 100 years ago. That is correct; the novel was evidently published on April 10, 1925.
I see in the Internet Archive that they revised the text. Originally the article was published Feb 9, 2021, and the wording was:
"Almost a century after he was written into being, F Scott Fitzgerald's doomed romantic has become shorthand for decadent flappers, champagne fountains and never-ending parties. "
The article was clearly occasioned by Nick by Michael Farris Smith being published later that same month, delayed until 2021 due to copyright issues.
Someone at the BBC simply made a note (or dug it up) to republish the article on the centennial of The Great Gatsby publication date, with some minor wording adjustment.
When has straightforwardness ever been a defence against misunderstanding? It is common for people to just not get something the first time they encounter it, understanding is usually a process that involves time and a bit of repetition.
I remember some questions Stallman once fielded after a talk he gave on Free Software that made me rethink the principle of "no stupid questions" - some people just don't get things. Doesn't matter how clearly it was laid out. Being beings made of meat does not promote comprehension.
He answered them without fuss. I got the impression it was a standard part of the show and he was used to it. I remember the feeling more than the questions themselves but they were probably of the "what if someone wants to use the software in a way you don't like/without paying" variety. They would have been fair questions ignoring the 30 minute lecture that had just been held on the detail of that exact topic.
Indeed. And I see no evidence for the premise or the article. I read the book at school, and we all understood the not very subtle point about the illusion of money and how it does not bring happiness. The hopeless romantic aspect does get more touching as one ages though.
Um, last I remember, my English teacher's cooy was absolutely full of underlined and also colored words due to a significant amount of color symbolism. The words maybe be within reach but it's the metaphors and deeper meanings which add great depth. I would hardly consider it "straightforward".
The prose is beautiful and satisfyingly layered. But the deeper meaning is consistent with the meaning of the words and is pretty accessible to anyone familiar with American culture and literary themes. It’s not 100 Years of Solitude, where you need a degree in Latin American studies to figure out the deeper meaning.
Metaphors and beautiful language don't change the plot. The Great Gatsby can be summed up rather easily: A man named Nick moves to town and is fascinated by his wealthy neighbor, Jay Gatsby. As they get to know each other, he discovers that Gatsby is enamored with his cousin Daisy Buchanan, who is married to a complete asshole. Over time, Nick and Tom both discover that Jay is not old money but rather most likely a man who amassed wealth by participating in fraud.
Tom Buchanan and Jay fight over Daisy, and Tom's side chick is overcome with emotion and is hit by a car. Tom couldn't give a fuck about what happened bc he's a total monster who only cares about money and power. Gatsby takes the blame for the woman's death, and her widower tracks down Gatsby and murders him in revenge.
Long story short: pre-Crash capitalism was an orphan-crushing machine. Gatsby got money to pursue love and ended up dead. Buchanan had money and has little positive emotion toward anyone else in the world. Daisy is also concerned with wealth and prestige and allows herself to be mistreated by her husband and thought about leaving him for a richer man. The narrator is also wealthy, and we see him do the same bad acts he criticizes others for, making him ultimately a hypocrite.
I'm well aware, I had the opportunity to read it in high school, though that was because of my grade stream; students in a 'lower' stream didn't get the same material.
Our prom theme the year I graduated was "The roaring 20s". The 2013 film had released months prior, and I remember discussing with friends how misleading it was--making the parties look incredible, while missing the book's subtler commentary. People who only glanced at the book, or only saw the film, can easily walk away thinking the Roaring Twenties were all glamour and fun, which is exactly the gap I was (poorly) pointing out in my earlier comment.
Yeah, I remember reading it in highschool and all we talked about eas the love story and parties. I re-read it in my early thirties for some reason and quickly realized the story was about temporal and moral tragedy. Daisy and Gatsby aren't romantics; they are morally shallow and selfish. I felt like the book was more about how we created a world were we train ourselves to chase glamor, but are punished for it in the process.
Funny enough a while back my wife and her friends were talking about having a "Gatsby" themed party. I think that is exactly what woukd have Fitzgerald rolling in the grave. Haha
Based on the photos I’ve seen of the Epstein sexual trafficking case - he and everyone in his circle saw Lolita’s protagonist Humbert Humbert as a role model for behavior - they openly call the female kids they abused variations of terms of endearment used for Dolly, the twelve to thirteen year old victim in Lolita and use quotes from the book in captions and notes. It’s a very short book and possibly because it is entirely IIRC from the pedophile’s POV these fans project their own values onto it.
On the one hand I can understand a little of the admiration for The Culture since it’s a post scarcity humanity and since Musk doesn’t lack for anything he cannot understand how that is different from reality for most of us but the fluidity of gender and sex is so in your face in most of the Culture books he could not have read them and liked them so much.
The admiration some readers have for Jay Gatsby (even though he’s meant to be a tragic figure) reminds me of how some currently view the character of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho as aspirational (minus the murder). I think America values success and beauty so dearly that it can override better judgement in cases.
This article ends up seeming like an ad for some dubious derivations of the original novel.
- "Take, for instance, Michael Farris Smith's new novel, Nick. The title refers, of course, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby, who here gets his own fully formed backstory."
- "Jane Crowther's newly published novel, Gatsby, updates the plot to the 21st Century, and flips
the genders to feature a female Jay Gatsby and a male Danny Buchanan."
- "And Claire Anderson-Wheeler's The Gatsby Gambit is a murder mystery which invents a younger sister for Fitzgerald's eponymous anti-hero: Greta Gatsby – get it?"
> Jane Crowther's newly published novel, Gatsby, updates the plot to the 21st Century, and flips the genders
I was tired of the idea of gender-flipping a story before the first story was ever gender-flipped, and I'm no less tired of it now.
I suspect that even people who think it's important to perform the rite of gender-flipping a story don't actually like the stories that result. Because it's the same story as before, but now you have the feeling the author is standing in front of you, waiting for an opportunity to remind you that the main character is a woman now and isn't that incredible?
Flip just one character and see if the romance changes in interesting ways, or if you can use prejudice against the character or something. At least a little more interesting than just inverting a dynamic.
well the target audience is people who do enjoy it. so, not you. maybe there's a whole dubious narrative about why... or maybe they just have tastes that seem simple and basic to you. why not?
Today, we tend to see The Great Gatsby as a work of historical literature, as it gives a window into the Roaring Twenties. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald did not set out to depict the past; he was depicting his own present. Similarly, Proust's literature is seen as a window into the French high-society of the Belle Epoque, a society in which Proust lived.
Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s? Such may not even necessarily be works of literature; they could be other storytelling mediums, such as film.
> Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s?
South Park?
Maybe collectively those "actually the villain is just misunderstood" movies I hear are becoming a thing recently? They seem like a decent candidate for the "window into the culture of the time" thing.
Some of those wide-audience computer games like Candy Crush and Farmville?
Part of the problem of our time is that shared culture has significantly receded. There's little capacity to maintain "classics" as we understand them today. Take any massive artistic output (film, book, TV show) and it's nowadays either not seen/read/heard by more than 20% of the population or it's a flash in the pan hit which will be forgotten in another year or so (e.g. Barbenheimer).
> Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s?
I think the film Tár will be. It captures the “fake it until you make it” spirit of the present really well along with the god complex and repressed guilt that accompany “making it”. Also the performances and direction are just excellent.
* Minecraft: This will probably hold the position Pac Man holds to us. Single biggest culture-marker perhaps.
* Taylor Swift: She's like Michael Jackson was (perhaps because of access and audience size improvements)
I don't know if Wikipedia or the mainline social media websites would count. People remember The Myspace Era. Tumblr and Twitter have reputations for their culture but would they be classics? Hard to tell.
To be fair, it’s a fair assessment. Superhero movies like that are a defining feature of the last two decades, with titles and plots worsening at an exponential rate. Not that prior decades lacked superheroes. They just used to be less superficial.
There’s a lot of discussion flying back and forth as to whether we’re in a period of cultural stagnation. Obviously you need to heavily discount the possibility of “old fogeyism” and reactionary nostalgia whenever you make such claims, and historically a lot of them have been totally false, but the one argument I have found convincing that we’re not in a good cultural place right now is the difficulty of coming up with such a work.
What work captured the zeitgeist of the 2010s and so far of the 2020s? I certainly can’t think of any novels that did it, far too much of that literary decade was about self-obsessed New Yorkers and had no relevance to anyone else. None of the reactions against it (i.e. Dimes Square) produced anything of lasting note either.
There is a good ending to Game of Thrones: evil wins, everyone dies. All the fools who pursued their own interests rather than face an annihilating threat get annihilated. It's right there in the show's motto. "Winter is coming."
The writers just lacked the courage to do it. They tried to tack a Disney ending onto a tragedy.
Either that or Cersei being queen would've been the correct ending.
The Lannisters would've had the only real army left without that WWE-style defeat of the Night King. Cersei's consistently outwitted everyone (except Tommen, I guess), and they knew how to buy loyalty.
Instead we ended up with the usual plot armor, and a "twist" that the character that behaved like a tyrannical zealot for 7+ seasons was, in fact, a tyrannical zealot.
No one even talks about GOT anymore bc the ending was so bad.
> No ending was going to be good
Why do you say that? Plenty amazing shows have great endings. And GOT isn't some uniquely incredible story. Killing MCs is not new to GOT, either, and you give that show too much credit. Lost did it long before GOT. 24. Grey's Anatomy is SUPER famous for it. They killed off like half the original cast in a single helicopter crash.
ASOIAF wasn't original bc it killed MCs. It was original bc it treated fantasy as political first, fantasy second.
I don't doubt that the show ending mirrors the book's intended ending, however a huge part of it is how you get to that ending, which they rushed and fumbled horribly in the show. Like Bran becoming King could work, but not when he basically shows up out of nowhere and nobody knows anything that happened to him or what he is capable of, he basically disappeared for years and when he came back he said a few nonsense things but wasn't involved in much of the politicing that could make him a viable candidate for King. Or Dany going full Mad King, after they spend seasons showing her trying to not be a crazy ruler but then suddenly snapping, instead of going through a series of harder and harder choices that turn out worse each time and drive her to more relatable desperation and violence.
At minimum they needed a full extra season and a full final season, if not more. But without GRRM handholding them throughout the entire plot they completely lost the path.
This article is infuriating. The most misunderstood? Of all novels? Are we sure? Why not call it a “very misunderstood” novel?
The entire article is a maze of ideas, explaining very little in the end. Okay, it’s misunderstood by young readers, people who think the latest movie adaptation looks cool, and so on.
That’s it? You don’t think The Catcher in the Rye and Dracula were even more misunderstood? I don’t get what the BBC columnist is getting at here. I’ve re-read the novel and it does ‘feel’ different when you’re older, but it never conveyed that the 20s were cool and parties were awesome back then. Ach!
I remember reading a take that Gasby could be read as mixed race, and that gives the story another dimension. (Probably unintended as the plain reading. But the absence of descriptors for Jay Gatsby alone implies this might have been something Fitzgerald toyed with.)
It's a high school book I believe and in my experience that tends to alienate a lot of people. I don't know whether school children have the life experience to understand the Great Gatsby.
I hate this sentiment. The book isn't "about" a thing in particular, neither does it "mean" any specific thing. It may have been written with some ideas in mind, and there may even be overt indications as to those ideas. Everyone has their own relationship with each and every piece of art, and may sometimes choose to include the artist and/or their intentions, but may also choose to exclude them.
The article even discusses certain readers' developing relationship over time! The book hasn't changed, the text is static. Even within a person, the understanding of the text is fluid. To say it could possibly be misunderstood is to say that there is a wrong way of understanding, but clearly there are at least multiple correct - or at least not incorrect - understandings!
A certain subculture of online males have fallen in love with Patrick Bateman. Now some of them might not have read or watched American Psycho, so to say they misunderstand the art is nonsense as they haven't actually seen it. For those that have and still choose to worship the obviously awful character, I see a lot of people say they haven't "understood" the film/book. They have! They just disagree with author's own interpretation!
I don’t agree. Yes, every work of art is open to interpretation, but that interpretation has to be informed by the art. There has to be supporting evidence and you have to consume the art holistically.
You can’t, for insurance, conclude that the meaning of The Princess Bride is that Sicilians are dangerous when death is on the line by focusing solely on a single character’s words, ignoring the fact that he is outwitted and dies, and ignoring that the book is primarily not focused on that character. I mean, you can; but then you definitely haven’t understood the film/book.
> To say it could possibly be misunderstood is to say that there is a wrong way of understanding, but clearly there are at least multiple correct - or at least not incorrect - understandings!
There are multiple correct understandings but there are also understandings that are completely incorrect, no? You’re saying any interpretation is valid, even ones that are clearly nonsensical?
At some point we have to bound our terms, obviously if someone interprets The Great Gatsby to be making commentary on interplanetary space travel they are incorrect but if someone was to interpret The Great Gatsby as containing some meaningful commentary that can be related to interplanetary space travel, that is within reason.
If your definition of "interpretation" involves making claims about the author or empirical details, it is clear you can be incorrect. Otherwise, I think everything else is permissible.
If the meaning of the book and the intention of the author diverges then the author has done a bad job.
If you can interpret a book however you want, what's the point of reading? I can just reject the author's intended meaning and substitute my own, but I can do that without reading at all, so why bother?
This is essentially why I didn’t do English Lit at uni (which had been my initial thought).
Up to age 18 I did well at English Lit by discovering that the more outlandish and fabricated the things I wrote, as long as I could find some tenuous hook for them, the more ‘sensitive’ I was praised for being for detecting them in the work.
In other words, everything was true and nothing was true.
I worry that the same is roughly true at university level, but with added social layers of what’s currently fashionable or unfashionable to say, how much clout you have to push unusual interpretations (as an undergrad: none), and so on. But perhaps I’m wrong?
I mean the fact is that it's easy to fake because the permissible space of interpretation is almost infinite. That will always be the case, and the only thing people demonstrate when they create fake analyses is that they can't be bothered engaging with the art honestly. That's fine, but it's no mark against the interpretation of art.
The real question is: who are you fooling? In a field where there's no right answer, the only person being fooled by you avoiding an honest reading is yourself. If you can make the right noises to trick someone into thinking you've considered the story, why not expose yourself to art and actually consider the story?
The point, in my view, of art is to form personal relationships with the artwork. I can read Notes From Underground with no background on the era or the author, and pass my own judgements on the characters. I can read the thoughts of the Underground Man and feel them in any which way that strikes me. The point isn't that Dostoevsky is telling me something, rather he has presented an opportunity for me to explore something I've not explored before. How guided and directed that exploration is remains mostly in the hands of the author, but sometimes all it takes is a presentation of a character and the rest of the work is the reader trying to integrate that character into their own worldview.
The most boring art is the art where the author stands next to it and describes what it's about. That's the art where I think "what's the point of reading": the author has summarised the intent of his work, presented the canonical reading and disparaged other readings. You might as well just have the intent summarised on a post-it.
The most powerful art can be the most "meaningless", the art where most of the work is by the reader, searching for connections between what's on the paper and what's in their head. Have you never spent hours with a poem or piece of music, and each retread sparks some new attachment to an experience or feeling? Perhaps the author never even considered their work to relate to how you related to your friends as a child, but I see it as totally wrong to claim that either you or the author have erred in that reading.
The meaning of "The Lord of the Rings" would be something like that: if you somehow got some dark skill (say, you're a good liar) then the only way to save you from becoming a slave of the Dark Lord is to get rid of that skill. You cannot use that skill "for good", because each time you do that the Dark Lord gets closer. The journey would be long and even if you manage to get to the end, it may still be hard to lose that skill: it is a part of you and losing it would be as easy as losing a finger.
Now let's see how we understand that meaning. Oh! We play endless sessions of Dungeons & Dragons! Here's a sword +4 and here's a cursed shield -2!
This is a very confused article, I think. The fact that people associate these extravagant roaring 20s parties with the character of Gatsby has everything to do with his character and over-the-top parties being the strongest cultural touchstone that people today have with that era, given that almost all of us (in the US at least) have to read it in high school.
The fact that the aesthetic qualities of Gatsby that are paid homage to have nothing to do with the subtext of those parties when you learn about his character is not a contradiction.
This happens all the time. Rappers loved Scarface and mob movies back in the 90s/00s and used to imitate those aesthetics all the time, despite Tony Montana being clearly depicted as a complete idiot whose lack of impulse control is his undoing. The didn't "misunderstand" Scarface. They just loved the aesthetics and power fantasy.
I feel the same about Fight Club (the movie, not necessarily the book). Many people focused almost entirely on the Tyler Durden character, either celebrating or criticizing the extreme masculinity. But the whole point of the movie was a rejection of that character.
Sure, but at the same time a whole lot of the movie is about rejecting the modern treadmill we find ourselves on -- and that appeals to many. If there were just a way to be strong and feel alive, and not worry about anything else.
Then the movie takes a turn and they hatch a scheme to blow stuff up and the viewer didn't realize what they were watching the whole time. In fact, calling it "Fight Club" is wrong if it's about the psychological drama going on in his head. It has nothing to do with the fight club, that's just one possible expression of it.
People latch on to the first 2 acts of discovering oneself when stepping out of the expectations of society. Critics of those people like to point out that there are bad things about the movie also. No shit. They don't seem to get that other people can differentiate between enjoying a fiction and blowing stuff up. Lots of people ran out to try an MMA gym, not very many started blowing up buildings. Most just watched a movie. But hey, it's really easy to feel superior saying those people are toxic idiots for liking it at all.
When parts of the general public enjoy a character that the author intended to be bad, there's often a lot going on under the surface that outside critics don't realise. This results in articles that are hilariously wrong from the perspective of readers who are more familiar with the movement.
Consider Patrick Bateman. There are at least six things going on with Bateman memes: aesthetic appreciation for the movie and/or character, comedic irony, intentional contrarianism to annoy the sort of people who write articles about how much they hate Patrick Bateman, an obscure in joke, following the format without understanding the underlying work, and genuine unironic belief that he's a good guy.
If you are not familiar with the type of people who make memes about Patrick Bateman or name sandwiches after the Great Gatsby, you might misread them as misreading the work.
Gatsby isn't supposed to be bad. He's supposed to be tragic.
The bad guys in Gatsby are Tom Buchanan and, to a lesser extent, Daisy. One might make a case that Nick is not a good person, but he's telling the story as a salve for his guilt. He's mostly just a hypocrite who doesn't want to admit he's the same kind of wealth that grinds non-wealthy people up for pleasure.
But Gatsby is a man who became obsessed with a woman and did everything he could to win her heart, including fraud. Yes, that's not good behavior, but he's not meant to be taken as a bad guy so much as someone who made some mistakes because of higher emotions.
Tom OTOH is just toxic masculinity. Fucks other women, can't stand any other guy getting attention, doesn't give a crap about people who die, etc.
>Rappers loved Scarface and mob movies back in the 90s/00s and used to imitate those aesthetics all the time
This has always bothered me, and I don't think it's some subtle aesthetic/ironic/contrarian take either. People who I asked at the time (00s) usually had something to say about him being "self made", or something else similar. Did you (royal you) actually watch the whole movie?
My interest in literature lies at the intersection with politics and society.
I resonate with the principle that art asks questions. In decades and centuries past, art was particularly important to the masses to question society at a time when that was often forbidden, forcing the use of metaphors. Literature, plays, opera and so on.
So a result of this is that as a general rule conservative political movements cannot produce art because they don't want people to ask questions. They want to give them answers that they take unquestionably in a similar way to how religious dogma is propagated.
So you see how fascist movements, most notably the Third Reich, have treated art and have sought "objective" beauty in an acceptable aesthetic and have denounced actual art as degenerate, even subversive, leading to such terms as "cultural Bolshevism".
So I see the Great Gatsby as questioning the very society of the Roaring Twenties where you might otherwise see it more superficially as simply depicting that era. It's historically noteworthy that it was released in 1925, well before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that was (IMHO) the inevitable consequence of an era of great inequality where wealth was accumulated, even then, through financialization. Lest we forget Nick was a bond salesman.
And on top of this system we have Tom and Daisy who are essentially parasitic, who float through life with no regard for the consequences of their actions, who produce and give back nothing in spite of their wealth and status. Other, most notably Gatsby himself, pay the price for their reckless disregard.
I first read the Great Gatsby before the dot-com bust but it seems like you can draw many parallels with the post-GFC tech boom. This is why, for me at least, the Great Gatsby is inherently anti-capitalist.
> The thought crossed my mind that it would be really interesting if someone were to write Nick's story," he says. In 2014, by then a published author in his 40s, he sat down to do just that, telling neither his agent nor his editor. It was only when he delivered the manuscript 10 months later that he learned copyright law meant he'd have to wait until 2021 to publish it.
WTf? Can't write an original spin off on some nearly hundred year old thing, without brushing with copyright law?
copyright law has been pretty goofy for a pretty long time now
> The Conan Doyle Estate filed a lawsuit against Netflix over [Enola Holmes (2020)], claiming it violated copyright by depicting Sherlock Holmes as having emotions. They argued this aspect of the character did not fall under the public domain as he was only described as having emotions in stories published between 1923 and 1927, and the copyright for the stories published in that period still had not expired under copyright law in the United States.
Crazy huh? If an author wrote something as a child and lived over a hundred, you could hit even two hundred :)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author, died in December 1940. Given the rules around copyright I would have expected things to expire in 2010 (death of author, roll to next calendar year, +70 years) so I'm unsure what happened here.
I was under the impression that the Mickey Mouse Protection Act 1998[1] extended the copyright protection for works retroactively (though already public domain works were excluded).
That being said, I guess the act had precautions to stop it from reducing the copyright protection for edge cases like these?
The US only switched to the life + 70 system in recent decades, and it doesn't retroactively apply.
I think if you add a child as a coauthor, the copyright will last longer. Nobody seems to do that, probably because it now lasts long enough for just about anybody.
Personally, aside from Russian literature, I now prefer American literature, which I think is underestimated in China. I really like that film adaptation, but what the film expresses is something else, not the same as the novel’s core theme.
My own understanding is that American literature has at least three themes that are very distinctive and different from Europe(or other countries). One is the depiction of desolation and human loneliness before the American continent was developed into a prosperous land. Another is the pursuit of the American Dream, where people achieve success through relentless struggle. The third is what this novel expresses: what happens after success? Money and career cannot solve all problems; people need more to fill an entire life.
I think this kind of contradiction is expressed most clearly in American literature and is also most worth articulating within the American cultural context. This is because its commodity economy and social transformation have been too successful, and it lacks the kind of historical entanglements that Europe has to dilute these problems. As a result, this sense of emptiness stands out even more sharply and demands a more urgent response.
I don’t know if there are horror films like this, but I once saw something similar in the TV series WandaVision. She creates an illusion in which she and Vision are a standard middle-class couple, well-fed and well-clothed, with the visuals in black and white. This made it feel like a horror story to me. Why? Because you feel as if they lack nothing, yet they seem like empty shells: their lives are filled with commodities, and all their actions seem stripped of a spiritual dimension.
Of course, I don’t think that America’s secular success means it has no spiritual world; rather, the former has been so successful that the latter has been greatly neglected. The purpose of American literature should be to depict, under the success of this commodity economy, what people’s inner lives have actually become, and what they ought to pursue. This, to me, is its most distinctive quality.
I'd add in a 4th category: Slavery.
Though no longer pertinent explicitly, the original sin of America is a potent literary force. We still feel it's sting in our African American literature nearly axiomatically. Almost by definition, any southern gothic literature will revolve around the effects of slavery, which includes some of our greatest novels.
Per the Great Gatsby, the story itself is one of the most powerful arcs out there: The Hero arc with a disillusionment ending. It's not exactly a negative change arc for the protagonist (Nick), but it's meant to feel like one. Nick is physically better off than he starts out, but his opinions and feelings about the world at large are negative. He has grown up, fought the dragon, healed the sick king, beaten the bully, encouraged the coward, and gotten the damsel. But Fitzgerald adeptly makes them all hollow. It's a great and quick read. A really tight plot and good prose.
Yes. I’ve probably only read Gone with the Wind and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Still, it feels like a fair share of American novels touch on this theme to varying degrees.
There are some subtleties in Gatsby that most people miss, and isn't even addressed in the article.
Jay Gatsby (James Gatz) is probably Jewish.
Nick Carraway is probably gay, but at least bisexual.
Both of these traits forced people into lower castes this era in high-status society. To me the lens of the book is repeatedly the failure of "if only I can win them over" slowly becoming the unsatisfying "these people were always assholes." Whether it's parties, a potential spouse, or important friends, the entire concept of class structure is poison. If people are good people, it shouldn't matter how they present themselves... that's just what I've always taken away from it. It seems like a theme that someone with Fitzgerald's background would want to convey, especially someone with that background who enjoined the company of people like Hemingway. And I think that's been a theme of American culture since reconstruction.
I've read thousands of books. There are good novels everywhere, and no country has the exclusivity of any theme.
> One is the depiction of desolation and human loneliness before the American continent was developed into a prosperous land.
Of course, classical European literature didn't focus on the American wilderness. Though the most famous book on this theme is probably Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. And I enjoyed T.E. Lawrence' Seven Pillars of Wisdom which most people know through the film; the Arabian desert was a good place for loneliness in the wilderness.
> Another is the pursuit of the American Dream, where people achieve success through relentless struggle.
Like wise, the American Dream is an American myth, which is rarely the focus outside of the USA. But searching success through relentless struggle is a frequent theme. For instance, Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir or Maupassant's Bel-ami. These are from two of the most famous classical French authors, but there are many novels about hard-working people that reach success.
> The third is what this novel expresses: what happens after success? Money and career cannot solve all problems; people need more to fill an entire life.
As you like Russian literature, I suppose you've read Goncharov's Oblomov and Chekov's theater, especially Uncle Vania. That theme is central in one of the most famous French novel, Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The excellent Italian writer Alberto Moravia also has many novels about this, the most famous being Il disprezzo and my favourite being Gli indifferenti. I also like D'Annunzio's Il piacere much more than The Great Gatsby. I would argue that variations of this theme are universal, with old writings like the Bibles's Qohelet and even more Sumer's Gilgamesh.
> Like wise, the American Dream is an American myth,
It's not a myth, it's just vastly overstated in its accessibility and chance of being able to achieve it.
I think what you said makes a lot of sense, and my earlier comment wasn’t very rigorous. More accurately, the most interesting thing about the United States is that it has almost stripped away all other influencing factors—no deep history, no influence from classical literature. If we set aside the atrocities committed against the Native Americans, it’s as if the country started from an untouched, resource-rich continent and rapidly evolved into the most advanced capitalist society. This makes the contrast between material wealth and the spiritual world especially stark and easy to observe.
You are going to love Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola.
Balzac is quite fantastic. And also not great for you if you have too much empathy for the characters but decide to read 10 of his books/stories in a row.
i definitely will give it a try
La Bête Humane
I know Zola, but I don't know why I haven't read his works yet. Just by reading the introduction, I know I would probably love all his works. Maybe it's because I've been reading more history and less fiction in recent years.
As a Chinese-American, in my humble opinion the Great Gatsby is the 1920's version of "On the Road", "American Psycho" and "Liar's Poker". In another words, it is about the American spirit to chase money/success/glamour in spite of the protagonist's preconceived understanding that doing so would end up ultimately futile and empty.
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgasmic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." IMHO, the green light is the dopamine rush of the American spirit.
Your notion of the American inner life that it somehow does exists I agree with but it is imho a far cry from stereotypical notion of inner life of quiet contemplation, familial and communal obligation in the European or Chinese manner. You can look no further than in this forum where people talk about accumulating material wealth whether by pursuing a well-paid tech job at a BigTech company or raising money or bootstrapping as an "indie". And people here will have read great books and understand the notions that "money do not buy happiness" or that "family is everything", but put the same people under your so-called WandaVision test of illusions of two choices - they will, 9/10 times choose a morally compromising job BigCo, business pursuit AdTech or AI Slop that favors material accumulation at the expense of true self-actualization (Gatsby vs. Nick).
IMHO the pursuit of "the green light" for the "orgasmic future" IS the American inner life, whether it be from the pioneers going West, to Italian immigrants in Brooklyn to Jersey Shore/Soprano's, to the rich Chinese Fu-Er-Dai shopping/clubbing fashion in Manhattan to the Indian immigrants going West again to switch job from WiPro to FAANG E6, the pursuit of accumulation and glamour is the inner life, dare I say "it's not even about the money" - but a spiritual pursuit of a lifetime of running to make one feel whole like Gatsby did . And that we can't help ourselves - like "boats against" rolling bubbles and crashes of the American stock markets or TikTok trends, thinking "but this time it's different", but "borne back ceaselessly" into our past selves of emptiness that we were trying to fill up with wealth and social status in the 1st place.
I recently read an American novel that gave me a deeper insight into what you were saying. I don’t know its English title, but roughly translating the Chinese title back, it’s California Gold. It’s about the son of a miner who dreams of striking it rich; step by step he becomes a wealthy man in California. The story has some moral sense, too. It was probably a very popular novel in the U.S. at one point.
But I felt the ending was rather unsatisfying, because it simply stops after he succeeds—lacking the kind of depth we usually expect from a great novel. Yet I also think that’s part of the charm of American fiction: it’s simple, rough, and fun to read. Kind of like the original Godfather novel. Of course, the deeper aspects require other literary works to explore. I haven’t read much, so I’m not sure who in America does it best—maybe Faulkner? On the Road, The Great Gatsby… I read those in college, and even after all these years, the impression they left on me is unforgettable.
> But I felt the ending was rather unsatisfying, because it simply stops after he succeeds—lacking the kind of depth we usually expect from a great novel.
I find this a lot with American TV and movies (not so much with books as I tend to read non-fiction).
Tying up all ends, sequentially and perfectly. It makes it all very unsatisfying.
> American TV and movies
I just thought of a perfect example: The Graduate. Many people like that uncertain ending—although they eloped, the camera keeps rolling, and we see them shift from initial happiness to confusion. A beautiful, simple ending is certainly nice, but an ending like this is far more unforgettable.
German filmmaker Christian Petzold often gets some flak for his ambiguous endings, but it's amusing that he actually follows European cinema tradition. It's his audience (even in Europe) that got more used to neat, fully wrapped endings from American media.
I think there’s a nuance. Chasing the low millions, and therefore financial security and comfort, is not the same as chasing billions, which would be Gatsby territory
Banality of evil. Promotion-driven/mortgage driven development. NIBMY. But don't mind me, I'm guilty of this more than most people but IMHO I think at least it's important to acknowledge the culpability of the affluent 10% people vs. the 1%. IMHO, we are worse than the 1% for enabling this society.
Totally disagree about "On the Road".
They don't chase money, success, or glamour. In fact, they're chasing the complete opposite of what Gatsby was chasing: spirituality. Their relationships are honest. They have no desire for money to influence.
In fact, on most spectrums, American Pyscho and On the Road are on totally opposite ends.
Sure, they share some themes like disillusionment and emptiness, but their core messages couldn't be farther apart.
Mi Mexicanito, sinceramente de este chinito, "On the Road" is imho about all about these gringo's chase for cultural/spiritual accumulation - just with beatnik fashion/prose than with a briefcase.
>Teresa (who is from Mexico/o la conquista sexual temporal de nuestro supuesto héroe en "busca de la verdad") didn’t want Sal to leave, but he told her that he had to. He had sex with Teresa in the barn his last night in the area, and the next morning Teresa brought him breakfast. They agreed to meet in New York whenever Teresa could get there, though Sal says they both knew this wouldn’t happen. Sal left and hitchhiked back to L.A., arriving in the early morning. There, he bought a bus ticket to Pittsburgh and spent most of his remaining money on food for the trip.
My reading of "On the Road" is Jack Kerouac's ultimate realization that their restless wandering is really a pursuit of narcissism of sex, jazz and drugs to fill up their empty inside. Look at the real personal lives of the Beatniks and Kerouac's later readings (e.g., Dharma Bums) for the confirmations or disconfirmations. Or look to the spiritual children of the Beatniks, the Western backpackers or the spiritual seekers to Mexico or Thailand (privileged, naive and ultimately exploitative and conformist when the chips are down).
/ My reading of On the Road is Jack Kerouac’s ultimate realization that their restless wandering is really a narcissistic chase—sex, jazz, drugs—to fill an inner void.
I don’t think the novel supports “narcissism” as a central answer that explains everything. The book is much more about restless hunger for experience and living in the moment. And jazz in particular isn’t framed as a symptom of emptiness; it functions as an aesthetic ideal that they’re trying to model their lives on.
Also, there is no ultimate realization in the book. There's ambivalence and fascination with Dean and the road, as well as increasing awareness of the costs and disappointments that life can bring, but it's not an ultimate indictment on it.
> Or look to the spiritual children of the Beatniks, the Western backpackers…
I'm not really interested in how it was interpreted later by various groups of people.
> privileged, naive and ultimately exploitative and conformist…
Conformity is neither something they desire not something they end up doing. In fact, their defining trait is the refusal of conventional stability.
Thank you for your response. My last word is one of my favorite film is "Y tu mamá También" where my favorite character de la película es Mexico, life is like foam, so give yourself away like the sea. Puedes vivir el momento, pero tu posición social es para siempre. Hope you have a great day/year.
> My own understanding is that American literature has at least three themes that are very distinctive and different from Europe... Another is ... relentless struggle
I feel like Russian literature touches on this.
I think there is, but not as stark as in the U.S.—the worldly success versus the spiritual “lack” is less contrasted.
Sorry - I was messing around by selectively misquoting you. Giving more of your original context:
> where people achieve success through relentless struggle
In my limited experience of Russian literature, the struggle doesn't lead to success!
> In my limited experience of Russian literature, the struggle doesn't lead to success!
There is a meme comparing different countries’ literature:
France: “I would die for love.” England: “I would die for honor.” America: “I would die for freedom.” Russia: “I will die.”
The harsh climate and scarce resources in Russia prevent it from producing something like the American Dream. People there seem to be more pessimistic.
> scarce resources
What now??? Russia is one of the most resource-rich countries on the planet! They are just very inefficient in doing anything with it. The country and all its people should all be among the wealthiest on the planet.
The impression of Russia as a resource-rich nation didn’t really take shape until after World War II. The widespread use of oil and natural gas only spans about a century, which hasn’t been enough time to fundamentally alter the literary essence of Russia.
And USSR is really not good at produce normal goods…
Maybe, but Russia's main problem is its climate. The coldest permanent settlement in the world is in Russia.
> The country and all its people should all be among the wealthiest on the planet.
...because natural resources make a country wealthy? It hasn't worked anywhere else.
It can. Look at Norway.
> I feel like Russian literature touches on this.
I think that’s an understatement.
Also that the "spiritual world" (i.e. religion) in America has been colonized by money, consumption and commodities as well, which has drained all the spirituality from it. Religion in America is as desolate of meaning and sustenance as the American Western Frontier. You have to be a heretic to find spirituality that's worth anything here.
Ancestral Americans really do not have a "spiritual world," in my opinion, as acquisitiveness and power games suffuse even our churches, spiritual movements, and fraternal societies. The emptiness you delineate is very integral to the long-term American experience. As a reaction, addictive and manic personalities are endemic.
You reminded me of that experiment a social media influencer did earlier. American Christian churches refused to provide her with help, but other religions did.
Those churches referred her to food pantries that were funded and operated by donations and volunteers from multiple churches.
They help people so often that there are entire subsets of organizations dedicated to different areas of need. Food, housing, disaster relief, clothing, rehab, women’s shelters.
One church in North Carolina that wasn’t involved with a local food pantry did just help her directly.
In order to ignore all that you’d almost have to think that the social media influencer was just trying to get attention…
I think the saying is "missing the forest for the trees.[1]"
Referring someone to another food bank or resource is not addressing or owning the immediate problem, which is what the experiment showed. Those organizations failed at their primary objective and instead of re-evaluating why they failed they hid behind process and procedure and how they were being tricked since it wasn't a "real" problem.
There was a proper way to handle this situation as anyone who has worked or called into customer service or tech support where their issue was addressed no matter what the internal structure of the organization was.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/miss%20the%20fore...
"Wood for the trees" is how I know it, since "wood" has a double meaning of a small forest and the material.
It almost makes you wonder who religion is for.
https://julieroys.com/tiktok-experiment-most-churches-give-m...
> It almost makes you wonder who religion is for.
Roleplayers. People who want to LARP they're Christians, while in practice they don't behave like them when the situation arises.
That sounds like a one-off anecdote. For my anecdote, when the government was shutdown and people on food stamps needed help, I counted 8 churches in my neighborhood serving meals to an influx of people, which aligns with my experience throughout my entire life. Maybe some churches don't help people as much as they should, but that seems to go against a core philosophy of the church and my experience with dozens of churches across America.
> Because you feel as if they lack nothing, yet they seem like empty shells: their lives are filled with commodities, and all their actions seem stripped of a spiritual dimension.
This is exactly the situation I am in. I really really don't know what to do.
I am always a strong advocate of doing volunteer/nonprofit work.
Folks on HN have some truly valuable skills that could make a huge difference. NPO work also brings together passionate, like-minded people. It’s an automatic community.
> -1 points
Well, that was quite a surprising reaction.
I guess it makes a statement. I'm just not sure what the statement is, though.
For me, I often have similar feelings. However, I have enjoyed reading since I was a child, so I usually know how to pass the time. There are countless excellent works, both novels and nonfiction, that one could never finish reading.
Figure out what is important to you. Just listen and don't force it. Don't feel guilty or shameful of where you are; it's ok. Be present in your feelings including the difficult ones.
I want to be not fucking lonely.
From the perspective of an otaku, that's an ironic conclusion. The confusion regarding the neglected interiority was a conscious decision by the mainstream in the beginning was it not?
That's perhaps not to say that the otaku lifestyle as is today is preferable, but it always more about the transcendent experiences they were reaching for, an activity labelled childish by their peers. Meaning was never an issue, just actualization.
While I'm not an American, I read a bit of American literature, and sometimes I feel that many American children/teenagers are exposed to the classics slightly early, before they can accurately pick up nuances, understand the social structure of the setting, and are able to grasp the different strengths and foibles of human beings, both real and fictional.
This tends to make them either misunderstand the text, read it literally, or just get bored of books in general. On one hand, I admire the fact that great books are read by young people (something which isn't true in my country), but I wonder whether it ends up being counterproductive.
Adaptations running away from the main story to focus overtly on stuff that attracts the audience instead of being faithful to the crux of the source material doesn't help either.
I think it’s probably counterproductive. It’s like religion - there’s arguably a lot to be gained from it, but people form negative early experiences and associate them with the thing itself. I’d love to re-read The Great Gatsby but dont want to relive middle school.
I think it's intentional. Going back and rereading both 1984 and Brave New World as an adult made me realize how awful my english teachers' interpretations ("fantastic dystopias" instead of "mirrors of then-current society") had been. Give them to kids who don't have the life experience to interpret them for themselves, and you can make people believe they know what Orwell and Huxley were writing about...
Its different for different children. Some of them understand more than you think, most of them dont.
I think that reading the classics can be beneficial to the first type. But some of the classics can be very bleak. Its not fair to the children to make them read those. 1984 is probably in this category. Read Animal Farm instead. It is also better for the second type of children.
If done properly, and in moderation, I think reading classics is beneficial.
> Going back an rereading ... made me realize how awful my english teachers' interpretations ...
Consider that a final lesson. Both about how much you've changed since high school, and about the career-ending downside to teaching kids that current society already is pretty damn dystopian.
> but dont want to relive middle school
I did not think it'd be this horrifying!
I completely agree. To this day it still drives me crazy that people think Animal Farm is about communism being bad, instead of what it was trying to warn us about authoritarianism and propaganda.
I'm a big Gatsby fan and recommend this recent Wesley Morris podcast about the book.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/our-last-chance-to-tal...
Morris has written some of my favorite long-form New York Times pieces, ("Willie Nelson's Long Encore", "Aretha Franklin Had Power. Did We Truly Respect It?", ), and he has the novelist Min Jin Lee and Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, as guests on the podcast to talk about why they regularly re-read Gatsby.
Min Jin Lee talks about how amazing the craft of the novel is (beyond the obvious greatness of the sentence-by-sentence writing).
A couple of months ago I was in New York and found a new cyberpunk re-telling of Gatsby called Local Heavens. A fun read if you like Fitzgerald, or re-imaginings of famous novels, or cyberpunk.
https://kmfajardo.com/local-heavens/
No wonder Gatsby is frequently misunderstood: Most people won't have the experience needed to understand it until they're in their 30s, but we prescribe it for high schoolers year after year.
I suppose you could argue that it is a great book in terms of style and prose, which is why kids should be introduced to the work. I did not grow up in the US, so I have only first read it as a young adult and I vividly remember that the book was beautifully written. It was a joy to read, which I cannot say about all classics.
The article underlines that what you get out of Gatsby will change substantially with age, and even encourages a re-reading later to get a different understanding of the novel.
If a teenager’s understanding of it is ‘wrong’ according to you, that’s precisely the point. Perhaps the blame should be cast on a teacher’s poor explanation of it?
I had similar questions regarding middle/high school literature studies. So many, so many ideas were out of reach from my soul when I was 15 (say the social contract by Rousseau). But maybe that was just emotional/existential immaturity on my part. Maybe some pupils, arguably a few, really had the maturity to connect with these themes. Maybe also, previous generations were more mature early on. I believe that in mathematics, in the 70s, it was expected to learn abstract algebra in high school, it college.
I think this is true of much of the traditional high school English curriculum. I was way ahead of most of my peers and still far too great an idiot to fully appreciate the novels we read. I have reread some of those classics as an adult and should probably read more of them.
i feel like this about literally every book I re-read a decade later.
The skill american high schools actually teach is to confidently misunderstand the thing in ways that conform to current trends. I still remember the absolutely outrageous hot takes about The Divine Comedy that were taken seriously and encouraged by our Lit teacher.
I always enjoyed D’Angelo Barksdale’s interpretation from The Wire:
> D’Angelo: "He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it—all that shit matters. Like at the end of the book, you know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right? You can say you’re somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are, and what happened before is what really happened.
> And it don’t matter that some fool say he different ’cause the only thing that make him different is that he say it. But it ain’t the truth. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did. And because he wasn't willing to get real with the story, it caught up to him."
> Inmate: "So you're saying he couldn't get over?"
> D’Angelo: "No, I’m saying he was who he was. They found him out. They found him out in the end. And that’s what it is. You can’t get over. You can’t even get out."
The show itself was pretty good too.
I am in (perhaps) a tiny minority in that I love American literature but just don’t get what the fuss is about The Great Gatsby. I just don’t think it’s that good a novel. Off the top of my head I could come up with a list of at least 10 American novels that I have read that I think are significantly superior.
In no order here goes
1. Blood meridian
2. The Bell Jar
3. Of Mice and Men
4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s gonna say “Gravity’s Rainbow” but I think since this is an explicitly American list, the themes of Mason and Dixon of the North/South divide etc put it more squarely on this list)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Moby Dick (I’m not the biggest fan of this actually but it’s way better than Gatsby for me)
7. Walden (Does this count? Anyway whatever. Walden)
8. Portrait of a Lady
9. Infinite Jest
10. Go tell it on the mountain
Honestly this is right off the top of my head and looking back I haven’t even got any Hemingway on here, or Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. I could make a case for Slaughterhouse 5 or Catch-22 or The Naked and the Dead or a bunch of other things. Like even though I think he’s a total tool, Bonfire of the Vanities probably has a good case for being on the list
I just genuinely don’t get the fuss about Gatsby. I’m glad people like it, but there seem far, far better American novels.
Edit to add: And yes I did read it. Twice in fact, once in my late teens after I had read a lot of serious literature and thought it was ok but not great and then again in my late 30s because I was sure I must have missed something and was very disappointed to come to the conclusion that I really hadn’t.
I have two theories for why maybe people like it so much. Firstly, because the author is such a stylist and they get strung along by some of the prose. But when you read a truly jawdropping stylist like for example in my book Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Cormac Macarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald really doesn’t stand well in that company.
Second theory (perhaps cynical) is that it’s the first novel in the US school syllabus that gets really serious literary criticism applied to it and so for a lot of people it is the book that awakens them to the power of literature. I could totally see that if you had a really great teacher introducing you to proper literature by means of the book you might love the experience and, because of that, the book.
I never really understood Infinite Jest, and I've tried to read it several times over the past couple of decades. I don't really get on with the "wacky wacky wacky" nonsense humour, and the constant sesquipedalian polysyllablism in every incongruent sentence makes it read like it was written by a smartarse 14-year-old who has just found they can look up long words in a thesaurus and thinks it makes them sound clever.
It's hard work to read with no payoff, I guess unless you like endless drivelling descriptions of drug use, which I don't.
Tangentially, if you enjoy The Great Gatsby, you might also enjoy All The King's Men, which is a work of fiction that I think similarly richly described a swath of the American experience.
As for Gatsby, I think it's a great piece of fiction that invites a lot of readings, and everyone's invited to that ownership of the text. I think you can come away with the deeply shallow understanding of "the twenties were cool," and still be enriched by Fitzgerald's writing style.
I don't think anyone has made a good film adaptation of Gatsby and I don't know if anyone will, as long as it's adapted literally. The imagery and iconography of wealthy 1920s America eats so much of anything that tries to adapt it, that they tend to come out feeling shallow, and the writing is so dense that dialogue feels stilted and weird spoken out loud. You'd either need to, in my opinion, lean heavily into both, or abandon both, to make a good adaptation (leaning into both immediately feels like a Wes Anderson movie to me).
I think the best adaptation would be to do something like Jobs, where they just take a few scenes from the book and create a movie out of that.
I think the 2013 movie unfortunately has made the book into the symbol of the roaring 1920s era, and that comes with a lot of baggage that Fitzgerald didn’t intend to put center stage. I can’t think of any other mainstream media that is also set in the 20s and has as big of a cultural pull. So everything 1920s related gets crammed into Gatsby, when in reality it’s more of a fable on American identity.
(2021) At the time (64 points, 72 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26085219
That's odd. The date on the article is now April 10, 2025. In the text it refers to the publication date of The Great Gatsby as being 100 years ago. That is correct; the novel was evidently published on April 10, 1925.
I see in the Internet Archive that they revised the text. Originally the article was published Feb 9, 2021, and the wording was:
"Almost a century after he was written into being, F Scott Fitzgerald's doomed romantic has become shorthand for decadent flappers, champagne fountains and never-ending parties. "
The article was clearly occasioned by Nick by Michael Farris Smith being published later that same month, delayed until 2021 due to copyright issues.
Someone at the BBC simply made a note (or dug it up) to republish the article on the centennial of The Great Gatsby publication date, with some minor wording adjustment.
Makes sense. Certain phrases like “Gatsby misunderstood” are always relevant.
I love the Great Gatsby, but I don’t understand how anyone could misunderstand the book. It’s quite a straightforward story.
When has straightforwardness ever been a defence against misunderstanding? It is common for people to just not get something the first time they encounter it, understanding is usually a process that involves time and a bit of repetition.
I remember some questions Stallman once fielded after a talk he gave on Free Software that made me rethink the principle of "no stupid questions" - some people just don't get things. Doesn't matter how clearly it was laid out. Being beings made of meat does not promote comprehension.
How did Stallman handle the questions?
He answered them without fuss. I got the impression it was a standard part of the show and he was used to it. I remember the feeling more than the questions themselves but they were probably of the "what if someone wants to use the software in a way you don't like/without paying" variety. They would have been fair questions ignoring the 30 minute lecture that had just been held on the detail of that exact topic.
If my high school English is to be believed, there isn’t a sentence that isn’t metaphor, and if you think it’s straightforward, you’re getting an F.
Indeed. And I see no evidence for the premise or the article. I read the book at school, and we all understood the not very subtle point about the illusion of money and how it does not bring happiness. The hopeless romantic aspect does get more touching as one ages though.
Um, last I remember, my English teacher's cooy was absolutely full of underlined and also colored words due to a significant amount of color symbolism. The words maybe be within reach but it's the metaphors and deeper meanings which add great depth. I would hardly consider it "straightforward".
The prose is beautiful and satisfyingly layered. But the deeper meaning is consistent with the meaning of the words and is pretty accessible to anyone familiar with American culture and literary themes. It’s not 100 Years of Solitude, where you need a degree in Latin American studies to figure out the deeper meaning.
Metaphors and beautiful language don't change the plot. The Great Gatsby can be summed up rather easily: A man named Nick moves to town and is fascinated by his wealthy neighbor, Jay Gatsby. As they get to know each other, he discovers that Gatsby is enamored with his cousin Daisy Buchanan, who is married to a complete asshole. Over time, Nick and Tom both discover that Jay is not old money but rather most likely a man who amassed wealth by participating in fraud.
Tom Buchanan and Jay fight over Daisy, and Tom's side chick is overcome with emotion and is hit by a car. Tom couldn't give a fuck about what happened bc he's a total monster who only cares about money and power. Gatsby takes the blame for the woman's death, and her widower tracks down Gatsby and murders him in revenge.
Long story short: pre-Crash capitalism was an orphan-crushing machine. Gatsby got money to pursue love and ended up dead. Buchanan had money and has little positive emotion toward anyone else in the world. Daisy is also concerned with wealth and prestige and allows herself to be mistreated by her husband and thought about leaving him for a richer man. The narrator is also wealthy, and we see him do the same bad acts he criticizes others for, making him ultimately a hypocrite.
Very likely a result of said anyone not having read the book in the first place.
It’s a short, easy read for high schoolers. They won’t be reaching for a dictionary and can probably pass the test based on study guides.
No work = no retention and no growth.
I'm well aware, I had the opportunity to read it in high school, though that was because of my grade stream; students in a 'lower' stream didn't get the same material.
Our prom theme the year I graduated was "The roaring 20s". The 2013 film had released months prior, and I remember discussing with friends how misleading it was--making the parties look incredible, while missing the book's subtler commentary. People who only glanced at the book, or only saw the film, can easily walk away thinking the Roaring Twenties were all glamour and fun, which is exactly the gap I was (poorly) pointing out in my earlier comment.
Yeah, I remember reading it in highschool and all we talked about eas the love story and parties. I re-read it in my early thirties for some reason and quickly realized the story was about temporal and moral tragedy. Daisy and Gatsby aren't romantics; they are morally shallow and selfish. I felt like the book was more about how we created a world were we train ourselves to chase glamor, but are punished for it in the process.
Funny enough a while back my wife and her friends were talking about having a "Gatsby" themed party. I think that is exactly what woukd have Fitzgerald rolling in the grave. Haha
Maybe the Gatsby-themed party was meant to be one where nobody was having fun but kept taking posed photos to post on Instagram.
Based on the photos I’ve seen of the Epstein sexual trafficking case - he and everyone in his circle saw Lolita’s protagonist Humbert Humbert as a role model for behavior - they openly call the female kids they abused variations of terms of endearment used for Dolly, the twelve to thirteen year old victim in Lolita and use quotes from the book in captions and notes. It’s a very short book and possibly because it is entirely IIRC from the pedophile’s POV these fans project their own values onto it.
See also: Musk’s naming things after Culture ships, Trump’s music picks like “Fortunate Son”, or complaints that Star Trek recently went “woke”.
On the one hand I can understand a little of the admiration for The Culture since it’s a post scarcity humanity and since Musk doesn’t lack for anything he cannot understand how that is different from reality for most of us but the fluidity of gender and sex is so in your face in most of the Culture books he could not have read them and liked them so much.
I read the whole article for some big reveal about how I had missed the point, but, yeah, it was all clear even in high school.
The admiration some readers have for Jay Gatsby (even though he’s meant to be a tragic figure) reminds me of how some currently view the character of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho as aspirational (minus the murder). I think America values success and beauty so dearly that it can override better judgement in cases.
They’re completely different characters and their qualities are completely different. You can easily admire tragic figures, as well.
As whole essay could be written about how this comparison misunderstands The Great Gatsby.
This article ends up seeming like an ad for some dubious derivations of the original novel.
- "Take, for instance, Michael Farris Smith's new novel, Nick. The title refers, of course, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby, who here gets his own fully formed backstory."
- "Jane Crowther's newly published novel, Gatsby, updates the plot to the 21st Century, and flips the genders to feature a female Jay Gatsby and a male Danny Buchanan."
- "And Claire Anderson-Wheeler's The Gatsby Gambit is a murder mystery which invents a younger sister for Fitzgerald's eponymous anti-hero: Greta Gatsby – get it?"
I had the same impression. Whatever it is about, it is not about
> Why The Great Gatsby is the world's most misunderstood novel
The first thought I had when reading the headline was: by what measure?
I wanted to give the benefit of doubt, but there is not even an attempt to answer the question set out at the beginning.
Instead, like you say, somewhat of an advertisment for later derivations with no clear idea of where to go.
For me underwhelming.
Not a very good ad then since it seems rather dismissive of them.
> Jane Crowther's newly published novel, Gatsby, updates the plot to the 21st Century, and flips the genders
I was tired of the idea of gender-flipping a story before the first story was ever gender-flipped, and I'm no less tired of it now.
I suspect that even people who think it's important to perform the rite of gender-flipping a story don't actually like the stories that result. Because it's the same story as before, but now you have the feeling the author is standing in front of you, waiting for an opportunity to remind you that the main character is a woman now and isn't that incredible?
Flip just one character and see if the romance changes in interesting ways, or if you can use prejudice against the character or something. At least a little more interesting than just inverting a dynamic.
Just write your own story then, let it stand on its own.
What are the other gender swapped retellings that you're thinking of?
In truth, the only one that comes to mind is Ghostbusters.
well the target audience is people who do enjoy it. so, not you. maybe there's a whole dubious narrative about why... or maybe they just have tastes that seem simple and basic to you. why not?
Today, we tend to see The Great Gatsby as a work of historical literature, as it gives a window into the Roaring Twenties. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald did not set out to depict the past; he was depicting his own present. Similarly, Proust's literature is seen as a window into the French high-society of the Belle Epoque, a society in which Proust lived.
Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s? Such may not even necessarily be works of literature; they could be other storytelling mediums, such as film.
> Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s?
South Park?
Maybe collectively those "actually the villain is just misunderstood" movies I hear are becoming a thing recently? They seem like a decent candidate for the "window into the culture of the time" thing.
Some of those wide-audience computer games like Candy Crush and Farmville?
Unironically dril's tweets[1].
Part of the problem of our time is that shared culture has significantly receded. There's little capacity to maintain "classics" as we understand them today. Take any massive artistic output (film, book, TV show) and it's nowadays either not seen/read/heard by more than 20% of the population or it's a flash in the pan hit which will be forgotten in another year or so (e.g. Barbenheimer).
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/dril/comments/cqde0e/pound_for_poun...
The Year is 2026.
Civilization has progressed little in the last 100 years.
Obligatory:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QbzcFbhPV-o&pp=ygUbVGhlIExpb24ga...
> Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s?
I think the film Tár will be. It captures the “fake it until you make it” spirit of the present really well along with the god complex and repressed guilt that accompany “making it”. Also the performances and direction are just excellent.
Great choice. Saw a free screening.
The ones that most qualify for me are:
* Minecraft: This will probably hold the position Pac Man holds to us. Single biggest culture-marker perhaps.
* Taylor Swift: She's like Michael Jackson was (perhaps because of access and audience size improvements)
I don't know if Wikipedia or the mainline social media websites would count. People remember The Myspace Era. Tumblr and Twitter have reputations for their culture but would they be classics? Hard to tell.
Breaking Bad, if we're lucky. More likely some superhero movie with a title like ThunderMan VI: Dawn of the Mayhem Battalion.
To be fair, it’s a fair assessment. Superhero movies like that are a defining feature of the last two decades, with titles and plots worsening at an exponential rate. Not that prior decades lacked superheroes. They just used to be less superficial.
There’s a lot of discussion flying back and forth as to whether we’re in a period of cultural stagnation. Obviously you need to heavily discount the possibility of “old fogeyism” and reactionary nostalgia whenever you make such claims, and historically a lot of them have been totally false, but the one argument I have found convincing that we’re not in a good cultural place right now is the difficulty of coming up with such a work.
What work captured the zeitgeist of the 2010s and so far of the 2020s? I certainly can’t think of any novels that did it, far too much of that literary decade was about self-obsessed New Yorkers and had no relevance to anyone else. None of the reactions against it (i.e. Dimes Square) produced anything of lasting note either.
The Social Network movie?
"they really liked pedophile vampires for a hot minute in the 2000s"
Game of thrones will be. No main character is safe since Ned Stark was killed on TV.
No ending was going to be good. Sopranos had a controversial ending too.
Silicon Valley captured the feel of the bay area and did a good job with satire.
2000s would be easier, I think 2010 is about the switch to super hero movies.
There is a good ending to Game of Thrones: evil wins, everyone dies. All the fools who pursued their own interests rather than face an annihilating threat get annihilated. It's right there in the show's motto. "Winter is coming."
The writers just lacked the courage to do it. They tried to tack a Disney ending onto a tragedy.
Either that or Cersei being queen would've been the correct ending.
The Lannisters would've had the only real army left without that WWE-style defeat of the Night King. Cersei's consistently outwitted everyone (except Tommen, I guess), and they knew how to buy loyalty.
Instead we ended up with the usual plot armor, and a "twist" that the character that behaved like a tyrannical zealot for 7+ seasons was, in fact, a tyrannical zealot.
No one even talks about GOT anymore bc the ending was so bad.
> No ending was going to be good
Why do you say that? Plenty amazing shows have great endings. And GOT isn't some uniquely incredible story. Killing MCs is not new to GOT, either, and you give that show too much credit. Lost did it long before GOT. 24. Grey's Anatomy is SUPER famous for it. They killed off like half the original cast in a single helicopter crash.
ASOIAF wasn't original bc it killed MCs. It was original bc it treated fantasy as political first, fantasy second.
Perhaps George R. R. Martin will finish the books some day, and we'll find out how he thinks it should end.
I’m starting to think he was honest that this was his intended ending, and he’s given up as a result.
I don't doubt that the show ending mirrors the book's intended ending, however a huge part of it is how you get to that ending, which they rushed and fumbled horribly in the show. Like Bran becoming King could work, but not when he basically shows up out of nowhere and nobody knows anything that happened to him or what he is capable of, he basically disappeared for years and when he came back he said a few nonsense things but wasn't involved in much of the politicing that could make him a viable candidate for King. Or Dany going full Mad King, after they spend seasons showing her trying to not be a crazy ruler but then suddenly snapping, instead of going through a series of harder and harder choices that turn out worse each time and drive her to more relatable desperation and violence.
At minimum they needed a full extra season and a full final season, if not more. But without GRRM handholding them throughout the entire plot they completely lost the path.
None of those shows were a pop culture phenomenon like got was when it was on.
It only ended a few years ago. The office took over 10 years to have a popularity resurgence.
This article is infuriating. The most misunderstood? Of all novels? Are we sure? Why not call it a “very misunderstood” novel?
The entire article is a maze of ideas, explaining very little in the end. Okay, it’s misunderstood by young readers, people who think the latest movie adaptation looks cool, and so on.
That’s it? You don’t think The Catcher in the Rye and Dracula were even more misunderstood? I don’t get what the BBC columnist is getting at here. I’ve re-read the novel and it does ‘feel’ different when you’re older, but it never conveyed that the 20s were cool and parties were awesome back then. Ach!
I remember reading a take that Gasby could be read as mixed race, and that gives the story another dimension. (Probably unintended as the plain reading. But the absence of descriptors for Jay Gatsby alone implies this might have been something Fitzgerald toyed with.)
Makes me want to read it :)
It's a high school book I believe and in my experience that tends to alienate a lot of people. I don't know whether school children have the life experience to understand the Great Gatsby.
I hate this sentiment. The book isn't "about" a thing in particular, neither does it "mean" any specific thing. It may have been written with some ideas in mind, and there may even be overt indications as to those ideas. Everyone has their own relationship with each and every piece of art, and may sometimes choose to include the artist and/or their intentions, but may also choose to exclude them.
The article even discusses certain readers' developing relationship over time! The book hasn't changed, the text is static. Even within a person, the understanding of the text is fluid. To say it could possibly be misunderstood is to say that there is a wrong way of understanding, but clearly there are at least multiple correct - or at least not incorrect - understandings!
A certain subculture of online males have fallen in love with Patrick Bateman. Now some of them might not have read or watched American Psycho, so to say they misunderstand the art is nonsense as they haven't actually seen it. For those that have and still choose to worship the obviously awful character, I see a lot of people say they haven't "understood" the film/book. They have! They just disagree with author's own interpretation!
I don’t agree. Yes, every work of art is open to interpretation, but that interpretation has to be informed by the art. There has to be supporting evidence and you have to consume the art holistically.
You can’t, for insurance, conclude that the meaning of The Princess Bride is that Sicilians are dangerous when death is on the line by focusing solely on a single character’s words, ignoring the fact that he is outwitted and dies, and ignoring that the book is primarily not focused on that character. I mean, you can; but then you definitely haven’t understood the film/book.
> To say it could possibly be misunderstood is to say that there is a wrong way of understanding, but clearly there are at least multiple correct - or at least not incorrect - understandings!
There are multiple correct understandings but there are also understandings that are completely incorrect, no? You’re saying any interpretation is valid, even ones that are clearly nonsensical?
At some point we have to bound our terms, obviously if someone interprets The Great Gatsby to be making commentary on interplanetary space travel they are incorrect but if someone was to interpret The Great Gatsby as containing some meaningful commentary that can be related to interplanetary space travel, that is within reason.
If your definition of "interpretation" involves making claims about the author or empirical details, it is clear you can be incorrect. Otherwise, I think everything else is permissible.
If the meaning of the book and the intention of the author diverges then the author has done a bad job.
If you can interpret a book however you want, what's the point of reading? I can just reject the author's intended meaning and substitute my own, but I can do that without reading at all, so why bother?
This is essentially why I didn’t do English Lit at uni (which had been my initial thought).
Up to age 18 I did well at English Lit by discovering that the more outlandish and fabricated the things I wrote, as long as I could find some tenuous hook for them, the more ‘sensitive’ I was praised for being for detecting them in the work.
In other words, everything was true and nothing was true.
I worry that the same is roughly true at university level, but with added social layers of what’s currently fashionable or unfashionable to say, how much clout you have to push unusual interpretations (as an undergrad: none), and so on. But perhaps I’m wrong?
I mean the fact is that it's easy to fake because the permissible space of interpretation is almost infinite. That will always be the case, and the only thing people demonstrate when they create fake analyses is that they can't be bothered engaging with the art honestly. That's fine, but it's no mark against the interpretation of art.
The real question is: who are you fooling? In a field where there's no right answer, the only person being fooled by you avoiding an honest reading is yourself. If you can make the right noises to trick someone into thinking you've considered the story, why not expose yourself to art and actually consider the story?
I don't think you believe this, honestly.
The point, in my view, of art is to form personal relationships with the artwork. I can read Notes From Underground with no background on the era or the author, and pass my own judgements on the characters. I can read the thoughts of the Underground Man and feel them in any which way that strikes me. The point isn't that Dostoevsky is telling me something, rather he has presented an opportunity for me to explore something I've not explored before. How guided and directed that exploration is remains mostly in the hands of the author, but sometimes all it takes is a presentation of a character and the rest of the work is the reader trying to integrate that character into their own worldview.
The most boring art is the art where the author stands next to it and describes what it's about. That's the art where I think "what's the point of reading": the author has summarised the intent of his work, presented the canonical reading and disparaged other readings. You might as well just have the intent summarised on a post-it.
The most powerful art can be the most "meaningless", the art where most of the work is by the reader, searching for connections between what's on the paper and what's in their head. Have you never spent hours with a poem or piece of music, and each retread sparks some new attachment to an experience or feeling? Perhaps the author never even considered their work to relate to how you related to your friends as a child, but I see it as totally wrong to claim that either you or the author have erred in that reading.
The meaning of "The Lord of the Rings" would be something like that: if you somehow got some dark skill (say, you're a good liar) then the only way to save you from becoming a slave of the Dark Lord is to get rid of that skill. You cannot use that skill "for good", because each time you do that the Dark Lord gets closer. The journey would be long and even if you manage to get to the end, it may still be hard to lose that skill: it is a part of you and losing it would be as easy as losing a finger.
Now let's see how we understand that meaning. Oh! We play endless sessions of Dungeons & Dragons! Here's a sword +4 and here's a cursed shield -2!
I think readers are free to interpret a work of fiction any way they choose to, and nobody should be chided for "misunderstanding" anything.
Yep. Time has taught us that often the author is a vehicle for the work, not the other way around.
This is a very confused article, I think. The fact that people associate these extravagant roaring 20s parties with the character of Gatsby has everything to do with his character and over-the-top parties being the strongest cultural touchstone that people today have with that era, given that almost all of us (in the US at least) have to read it in high school.
The fact that the aesthetic qualities of Gatsby that are paid homage to have nothing to do with the subtext of those parties when you learn about his character is not a contradiction.
This happens all the time. Rappers loved Scarface and mob movies back in the 90s/00s and used to imitate those aesthetics all the time, despite Tony Montana being clearly depicted as a complete idiot whose lack of impulse control is his undoing. The didn't "misunderstand" Scarface. They just loved the aesthetics and power fantasy.
> Tony Montana being clearly depicted as a complete idiot whose lack of impulse control is his undoing. The didn't "misunderstand" Scarface.
I think you’d be surprised how many people didn’t understand that
I feel the same about Fight Club (the movie, not necessarily the book). Many people focused almost entirely on the Tyler Durden character, either celebrating or criticizing the extreme masculinity. But the whole point of the movie was a rejection of that character.
Sure, but at the same time a whole lot of the movie is about rejecting the modern treadmill we find ourselves on -- and that appeals to many. If there were just a way to be strong and feel alive, and not worry about anything else.
Then the movie takes a turn and they hatch a scheme to blow stuff up and the viewer didn't realize what they were watching the whole time. In fact, calling it "Fight Club" is wrong if it's about the psychological drama going on in his head. It has nothing to do with the fight club, that's just one possible expression of it.
People latch on to the first 2 acts of discovering oneself when stepping out of the expectations of society. Critics of those people like to point out that there are bad things about the movie also. No shit. They don't seem to get that other people can differentiate between enjoying a fiction and blowing stuff up. Lots of people ran out to try an MMA gym, not very many started blowing up buildings. Most just watched a movie. But hey, it's really easy to feel superior saying those people are toxic idiots for liking it at all.
When parts of the general public enjoy a character that the author intended to be bad, there's often a lot going on under the surface that outside critics don't realise. This results in articles that are hilariously wrong from the perspective of readers who are more familiar with the movement.
Consider Patrick Bateman. There are at least six things going on with Bateman memes: aesthetic appreciation for the movie and/or character, comedic irony, intentional contrarianism to annoy the sort of people who write articles about how much they hate Patrick Bateman, an obscure in joke, following the format without understanding the underlying work, and genuine unironic belief that he's a good guy.
If you are not familiar with the type of people who make memes about Patrick Bateman or name sandwiches after the Great Gatsby, you might misread them as misreading the work.
Gatsby isn't supposed to be bad. He's supposed to be tragic.
The bad guys in Gatsby are Tom Buchanan and, to a lesser extent, Daisy. One might make a case that Nick is not a good person, but he's telling the story as a salve for his guilt. He's mostly just a hypocrite who doesn't want to admit he's the same kind of wealth that grinds non-wealthy people up for pleasure.
But Gatsby is a man who became obsessed with a woman and did everything he could to win her heart, including fraud. Yes, that's not good behavior, but he's not meant to be taken as a bad guy so much as someone who made some mistakes because of higher emotions.
Tom OTOH is just toxic masculinity. Fucks other women, can't stand any other guy getting attention, doesn't give a crap about people who die, etc.
>Rappers loved Scarface and mob movies back in the 90s/00s and used to imitate those aesthetics all the time
This has always bothered me, and I don't think it's some subtle aesthetic/ironic/contrarian take either. People who I asked at the time (00s) usually had something to say about him being "self made", or something else similar. Did you (royal you) actually watch the whole movie?
My interest in literature lies at the intersection with politics and society.
I resonate with the principle that art asks questions. In decades and centuries past, art was particularly important to the masses to question society at a time when that was often forbidden, forcing the use of metaphors. Literature, plays, opera and so on.
So a result of this is that as a general rule conservative political movements cannot produce art because they don't want people to ask questions. They want to give them answers that they take unquestionably in a similar way to how religious dogma is propagated.
So you see how fascist movements, most notably the Third Reich, have treated art and have sought "objective" beauty in an acceptable aesthetic and have denounced actual art as degenerate, even subversive, leading to such terms as "cultural Bolshevism".
So I see the Great Gatsby as questioning the very society of the Roaring Twenties where you might otherwise see it more superficially as simply depicting that era. It's historically noteworthy that it was released in 1925, well before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that was (IMHO) the inevitable consequence of an era of great inequality where wealth was accumulated, even then, through financialization. Lest we forget Nick was a bond salesman.
And on top of this system we have Tom and Daisy who are essentially parasitic, who float through life with no regard for the consequences of their actions, who produce and give back nothing in spite of their wealth and status. Other, most notably Gatsby himself, pay the price for their reckless disregard.
I first read the Great Gatsby before the dot-com bust but it seems like you can draw many parallels with the post-GFC tech boom. This is why, for me at least, the Great Gatsby is inherently anti-capitalist.
> The thought crossed my mind that it would be really interesting if someone were to write Nick's story," he says. In 2014, by then a published author in his 40s, he sat down to do just that, telling neither his agent nor his editor. It was only when he delivered the manuscript 10 months later that he learned copyright law meant he'd have to wait until 2021 to publish it.
WTf? Can't write an original spin off on some nearly hundred year old thing, without brushing with copyright law?
copyright law has been pretty goofy for a pretty long time now
> The Conan Doyle Estate filed a lawsuit against Netflix over [Enola Holmes (2020)], claiming it violated copyright by depicting Sherlock Holmes as having emotions. They argued this aspect of the character did not fall under the public domain as he was only described as having emotions in stories published between 1923 and 1927, and the copyright for the stories published in that period still had not expired under copyright law in the United States.
This was a nuisance lawsuit, and Netflix only settled to make it go away. They would've crushed the Estate if it actually went to trial.
Crazy huh? If an author wrote something as a child and lived over a hundred, you could hit even two hundred :)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author, died in December 1940. Given the rules around copyright I would have expected things to expire in 2010 (death of author, roll to next calendar year, +70 years) so I'm unsure what happened here.
The rules were different at the time Gatsby was published. Its copyright expired 95 years after it was published - 1930 + 95 = 2025.
I was under the impression that the Mickey Mouse Protection Act 1998[1] extended the copyright protection for works retroactively (though already public domain works were excluded).
That being said, I guess the act had precautions to stop it from reducing the copyright protection for edge cases like these?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
But Nick is not a derivative work; it's something original which references the characters and ideas in The Great Gatsby.
It's pretty crazy that you have to wait until 95 years until the publication of the referenced work to publish something like this.
Is it even about copyright or more about the abstract threat of litigation using copyright as a (baseless) pretext.
Whack, I always naively assumed copyright periods have only ever gotten longer. Good to know The Mouse [1] has precedent behind their legal theory :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#S...
It was published in 1925 and expired in 2021.
The US only switched to the life + 70 system in recent decades, and it doesn't retroactively apply.
I think if you add a child as a coauthor, the copyright will last longer. Nobody seems to do that, probably because it now lasts long enough for just about anybody.