A lot of people say this book is about the futility of the American

>>9474182
>Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
How can you call this innocent and sentimental? It's really tragic and grim, the only thing that redeems it from seeming edgy is that the style is heavenly.

I think in a way you're right that it could've been better, more universal of a book if it was more about the eternal theme of losing the past and didn't focus so heavyhandedly on the futility of the American Dream and decadence of rich people as it does. It's too regional, I find Europeans don't really care about it, although i still think it's a beautiful book.

I mean it's obviously about trying to hold onto the past too. This is a pretty trite OP, really, I'd give this thread a solid 4/10.

>>9474274
i agree with this guy.

I've heard this and knew this already, it's just one facet of the themes of our dreams' futility: the fact that the exterior thing we want isn't really what we really need, the real problem is inside of us.

>>9474182
I've read a strong existentialist interpretation of this before. Apparently Scotty was influenced by some of Nietzsche's works that came flowing in America at that time and Gatsby was a Kierkegaardian KoF while Nick was a Nietzschean hero. Sounds really bizzare, but that dissertation convinced me. Has more depth than all that "rich is bad" banality.

>>9474274

I just relate a lot to that passage. Something you desperately want to recall but it's just on the edge of your consciousness, it's almost there but you can never fully grasp it again.

Some more passages I really like

>Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.

>The bottle of whiskey — a second one — was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who “felt just as good on nothing at all.” Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

>But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

>When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. That’s my Middle West — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

>>9474274
>I find Europeans don't really care about it

I wonder if there's a European book that can be pointed to to say "this is what it (the book) is about"? I know there's the Welsh word 'Hiraeth' that covers it, but not really a consumable book.

>>9474182
>To me the main theme of the book is "nostalgia"

Yeah, that's what I thought, too. In fact I thought Fitzgerald hammered it home so hard and with so little subtlety I was shocked to find that people focused on the more superficial themes like class in the 20s etc.

>>9474375
I agree. The book is so much more about nostalgia and the way a person's geographic and social history express that (basically, a mid-westerner in the big city; see the other anon's quote about trains and the middle west) that it's amazing that so many focus on superficial elements.

I mean, my God, the very last line is so clearly and deeply about nostalgia that it should basically be unmissable:

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

But instead we get the vast majority of teachers and professors just entirely missing the point, focusing on some particular tree (race/class/wealth/setting/etc) and missing the enormous and obvious forest.

---

(Aside: OP's quote "...I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives..." should entirely put to bed the 'Nick is gay' nonsense that is being taught in the academy today, but alas it won't)

>>9474274
>tragic and grim
Bingo. The oppressive nostalgia and profound feelings of loss go hand in hand with """the futility of the american dream,""" however. The latter is just another face of the former, really, same with Tom cucking that worker dude and the class themes. The all-encompassing aesthetic of the novel has to be grasped in its totality.
Gatsby has this halo around him either because he's "standing up to and opposing" an unjust fact of reality most submit to without a second thought, or because he's beautifully naive or unable to grasp this fact of reality, and the narration blends the two prospects together haphazardly.

>>9474548
>instead we get the vast majority of teachers and professors just entirely missing the point, focusing on some particular tree (race/class/wealth/setting/etc) and missing the enormous and obvious forest.
They do that mostly because they have to read anywhere from 20-50 papers on the book, and pigeonhole the students into unreasonably narrow topics because they don't want to read that many minor variations on the same paper.
>should entirely put to bed the 'Nick is gay' nonsense
I'm gay and it's pretty obvious to me that Nick's attachment to Gatsby is at a far deeper level than sexual/romantic attraction. "Nick's gay" is a huge copout imo, it's an unnuanced book, but not that unnuanced.

>>9474548

wtf, people actually teach that nick is gay?

You know if you read his Jellybean short story you'd realize he was just a prosaically sophisticated John Green

>>9474581
not that i'm going to argue that he is gay, but what do you guys make of the scene where Nick's alone and shirtless in a bedroom with a photographer he thinks is attractive? that always struck me as a weird episode if nothing else

>>9474586
Please tell me your address, I would like to come to your house and murder you

>>9474596
>if you think another dude is good looking you're gay
k

>>9474586
This could have been a 10/10 post without the low hanging Green. The fucking jellybean story kek