Why The Great Gatsby is the world’s most misunderstood novel

Great Gatsby is a synonym for party, grits and glamour, but this is just one of many misconceptions about the book that began in April 1925 with its first publication.

Just as Jay Gatsby does the jazz era, there are few characters who are very persistent in literature and actually life to embody the era. Almost a century after he was written in Being, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fate romanticism became a shorthand for decadent flappers, champagne fountains, and never-ending parties. From the text he was born, loosened by pop culture, his name adorns everything from apartment complexes to hair wax and limited edition cologne (including notes of vetiver, pink pepper and Sicilian lime). You can now relax on Gatsby’s sofa, check in at Gatsby Hotel, or get exposed. Gatsby sandwich – Essentially, it’s a super-sized, soupy chip batti.

That last item is named, but it is inconsistent Anything It seems there’s more to the touch than the man previously known as James Guts. After all, the gorgeous host is just part of his complicated identity. He is also a bootlegger along the neck of a criminal enterprise, not to mention the paranoid stalkers that make showmanship seem incredibly sticky. If he embodies the possibilities of America’s dreams, he also shows its limits.

The misunderstanding was part of the great Gatsby story from the beginning. Complaining to his friend Edmund Wilson shortly after the novel was published in April 1925, Fitzgerald declared, “Even the most enthusiastic of all reviews had no slight idea of ​​what the book was.” While fellow writers like Edith Wharton praised it a lot, we read as critic Maureen Corrigan tells her book: How the great Gatsby endures and why it endured, popular reviewers read it as criminal fiction, which was clearly overwhelmed by it. Fitzgerald’s latest A Dud ran the headlines in the New York world. This novel achieved only a decent sale, and by the time of the author’s death in 1940, a very modest second printed copy had been left for a long time.

Gatsby’s luck began to change when he was chosen as a prize by the US military. As World War II approached the end, approximately 155,000 copies were distributed in a special armed service version, creating new readers overnight. As the 1950s began, the prosperity of the American Dream accelerated the topic of novels, and by the 1960s it was enshrined as a set text. It has since been such a powerful force in pop culture, and even those who have never read it feel like they are being helped by Hollywood, of course. It was in 1977 that Robert Redford appeared in the title role of the adaptation, written by Francis Ford Coppola. The word “Gatsbyesque” was first recorded.

Along with Baz Luhrmann’s Divisive 2013 film Extravaganza, the book produced a graphic novel. Theatre experience And a TV moviesIt aired in 2000 with Paul Rudd, Toby Stevens and Mira Sorvino. And since then The copyright of the novel has expired In 2021, the Gatsby industry exploded, allowing anyone to adapt it from real estate without a permit. Early call Muppet adaptation There may have been nothing (please never say it), but musical Florence Welch + The Machine song opened (and closed) on Broadway last year. Another, Tony-winning musical, the great Gatsby is still running Broadway And I’m trying to open it LondonAuthor Min Jin Lee and cultural critic Wesley Morris wrote a fresh introduction to the 2021 edition.

If this all tinkers with pearls like beads of worry, some such projects may further perpetuate the myth that throwing a Gatsby-themed party could be sublimely ignorant, but it is very likely that others may even be able to make us more perpetuate the myth that being so familiar with us often can complicate us. Consider, for example, Nick, a new novel by Michael Faris Smith. The title, of course, refers to Gatsby’s narrator, Nick Caraway. It tells the story of Midwester, who went to Europe to fight in World War I and returned to the trench war with a whirlwind love affair in Paris. Before he heads to the egg west of Long Island, there is room for an impulsive stay in New Orleans Underworld.

Like many, Smith first encountered novels in high school. “I totally didn’t get it,” he told the BBC from his home in Oxford, Mississippi. “They seemed to complain about things that a lot of people shouldn’t really complain.” It was only when he picked it up again while living abroad in his late 20s that he began to understand the power of the novel. “It was a very surreal reading experience for me. On almost every page, something seemed to be talking to me in a way I didn’t expect,” he recalls.

When Caraway suddenly reaches a scene where he remembers his 30th birthday, Smith is filled with questions about what Gatsby’s narrator really was. “It seemed like there was a real trauma that even made him very isolated, even from himself. In 2014, an author published by his 40s, he sat down to do exactly that, saying, his agent and editor. Only when he delivered the manuscript ten months later would he have learned that copyright law had to wait until 2021 for it to be published.

Smith points to a quote from one of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries. “Ernest Hemingway says [his memoir] Smith imagines Caraway dealing with PTSD and shell shock and returning to a country he no longer recognizes. Dance, maybe it’s the feeling that where we are, everything can fall apart, and that Gatsby means from generation to generation. ”

William Cain, an American literature expert at Wellesley College and an English professor at Mary Jewett Gaiser, agrees that Nick is important for understanding the richness of novels. “Fitzgerald thought about structuring it with a third party, but he ultimately chose Nick Caraway, the first person narrator who tells the story of Gatsby and the first person narrator who will become the intermediary between us and Gatsby. We must respond and understand Gatsby. Criticism, even in one moment, is only lightly empty,” he says.

Like Smith, Cain first encountered novels as a student. It was a different era – the 1960s – but even so, little attention was paid to Nick. Cain speaks of symbolism instead – for example, the legendary green light and the legendary car of Gatsby. In a way, the education system is just as responsible as pop culture for this limited reading of this original textbook. It could be a great American novel, but with less than 200 pages, its attractive economic storytelling makes its research points extremely easy to access. Ironically, given that this is a novel of fantasy and delusions and the surface is important, we often overlook and overlook the texture of the prose. As Cain said, “When we think of the great Gatsby, we need to really enter the richness of page writing from Fitzgerald’s actual pages, not as a novel that is the opportunity or starting point for us to talk about the big themes and questions of America. We have to come to Gatsby.

Cain rereads the novel every two or three years, but in 2020, when President Biden accepted the Democratic nomination at the DNC, he spoke about his right to pursue a dream for a better future, and often thinks about it in the meantime. America’s dreams are, of course, a major theme for Gatsby and are something that continues to be misunderstood. “Fitzgerald shows that dreams are very powerful, but very difficult for most Americans to realize. Among the obstacles, Fitzgerald seems to suggest that it is a difficult class line where there is no amount of money that allows Gatsby to cross. It is a view that resonates with the mood Cain says he is picking up among his students. It is a particular “melancholy” for American dreams, a feeling that has been fanned by racial and economic inequality only deepened by the pandemic.

In certain other respects, the novel doesn’t wear that well. Fitzgerald showed where his loyalty lies by highlighting the ugliness of Tom Buchanan’s white supremacist beliefs, but he repeatedly described African Americans as “Bucks.” The novel also irritates frustration from a feminist perspective. The female character lacks dimensions and agency, and instead is seen through the prism of male desires. But now there is a path open to endless creative responses to the older and more unpleasant aspects. Jane Crowther’s newly published novel, Gatsbyrenewing the plot to the 21st century, with gender flips featuring female Jay Gatsby and male Danny Buchanan. Claire Anderson Wheeler Gatsby Gambit A murder mystery inventing his sister for an anti-hero named after Fitzgerald: Greta Gatsby – get it?

But to an impressive degree, the new attention brought about by the copyright expiration date and 100th anniversary shows not only how relevant and seductive the texts of Fitzgerald’s novels are, but how alive they are invariably alive. Pick it up at 27 and you’ll find a novel that’s different from the one you read as a teenager. When I revisited again at 45 it feels like a completely different book. Copyright had nothing to do with the influence of the words it governed.

When Smith finally managed to publish Nick in 2021, he returned to Great Gatsby once more for his final edit. “I think it will always evolve in my head and become a novel that will always change based on who I am,” he says. “That’s a great novel.”

The version of this article was originally published in 2021.