Fitzgerald’s epic tale of loss in Gatsby

Just a couple months past 5 years, I’ve completed my quest to read 100 great classics with one of the best, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It’s almost fitting that I finish with a Fitzgerald piece, as it nearly started with one too (# 96 was The Beautiful and the Damned, which I wrote about way back in March 2015).

Gatsby is arguably his most famous work, so you’ve probably read it yourself in school, or seen the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, or at least know the gist of it. Told from the perspective of Jay Gatsby’s friend Nick Carraway, it is a tale of lost love, regret, and a man’s single minded obsession. By all appearances, Gatsby is fabulously wealthy, throwing large, extravagant parties at his sprawling estate to which anyone and everyone is invited, but his past is a complete mystery and the subject of wild speculation among society. Across the bay from him lives Tom and Daisy Buchanan, a rich couple with marital problems. Tom is a brute and cheats on his wife, but Daisy seems to turn a blind eye to his activities. Our narrator Nick is the link between these people: Daisy is his second cousin, he went to school with Tom, and he is Gatsby’s neighbor.

As Nick gets to know Gatsby, he learns Jay’s terrible secret: he is a former love of Daisy’s from before the war, purposefully bought the house across the bay from the Buchanan’s, and has been throwing these huge parties in hopes that she would come and see him. She’s never made the trip though, so finally Gatsby gets Nick to invite her to tea at Nick’s house, and Jay swoops in to see her. After an awkward moment, they seem to pick up where they left off 5 years previous, and Jay confides his ultimate plan to Nick. He wants Daisy to leave Tom, and not only that, but to confess to him that she’s always loved Gatsby and never loved Tom at all. Jay has built his fortune from the ground up (through illegal bootlegging, but that’s another story), and is used to getting his way, but obviously he can’t control people’s emotions, no matter how hard he tries. During the big final confrontation, Daisy refuses to admit what he wants in any kind of definitive way.

Daisy flees the scene with Gatsby in his very recognizable luxury car, and while speeding home, they strike and kill a pedestrian, who is Tom’s not-so-secret mistress, Myrtle, no less. Though Daisy was the driver, Jay is ready to take the blame. He waits outside the Buchanan house to see if Daisy will come to him, but she ends up making up with Tom and never leaves. The next day, Gatsby goes for a swim in his pool (he had been lamenting that everyone uses his pool except himself) and is shot and killed in a murder-suicide by Myrtle’s surviving husband, who of course thought that Gatsby was the driver the previous night. At Gatsby’s funeral, the only attendees are some of his servants, Nick, and Jay’s long-unknown father. Daisy and Tom had already skipped town and she wouldn’t even return Nick’s calls.

Fitzgerald’s writing is so easy to read, so lyrical, that it is easy to see why his books have stayed so popular. This is the fourth book of his I’ve read, and I’ve enjoyed them all. Gatsby is filled with such a feeling of loss, yet also I felt hope at times, that you can’t help but get swept up in the emotional roller coaster ride of it all. Knowing a little of Fitzgerald’s own conflicted love affair with his wife Zelda, it is easy to see the depth of the well he had to pull from.