The Great Gatsby

F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

Betyg: 4

It's about dreams, isn't it? The illusion, as in chasing after, building something upon nothing. James Gatz has a dream, becomes it, and never realizes that the very chasing of that dream is what makes it impossible. It's the very symbol of Gatsby's success and the prize he was looking for that brings him down in the end (the car and the girl - what else, that's the American dream, right?) To get what he wants, be what he wants, he has to become someone whom that person, that life doesn't want. The brief summer, the onset of autumn, the unstoppable passage of time. I gather this is one of those books that all American schoolchildren are made to read, and it shows; it's a bit like being handed a decoder ring, recognizing themes and images that later turn up in lots of others, from Nabokov and Salinger to Dylan... Plus, there's Fitzgerald's language. It mystifies me; almost sloppy at times, then suddenly highly (almost too highly) poetic, mixing what is today almost hokey dialogue with sentences that just burn into my head.

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight." One of those sentences that turns out to be actual foreshadowing, worked before we knew that, and still works afterwards.