I distinctly remember this one time when I slammed my hand in a car door and noticed it was less painful than reading The Great Gatsby.

LOL...

What don't you like about it?

Not my favorite work, probably wouldn't crack a Top 20, but I like it, especially Gatsby, who I think is easily one of the best characters in American literature...he's just so awesome and yet so flawed...and yet he embodies so much of how the American Dream played out--

You CAN raise above poverty to become what you want to be...but at a price, and often illegally, and it's a double-sided sword, one that runs Gatsby through in the end.

And after all, that's how a lot of rich families in America got rich, through organized crime or "legal" operations that were as bad as crime for some...

*Shrugs*

(Then again, I distinctly remember running head-first into a brick wall once and noticed it didn't cause me as much agony as College Math.)

;)

It was a poorly written book about a bunch of rich people whining about rich people's problems. The characters were static as shit and they were all so revolting I couldn't sympathize with a single thing that happened to anyone.

Well, I'll agree some of those characters are static...

Part of the problem--if that's the right word, because I think this part's more a matter of taste than an outright issue, and I don't mind it that much--is that a lot takes place before the book, so a lot of the "dynamic-ness" of the book is lost a bit in the fact that characters have been dynamic...just in the past leading up to this book.

Gatsby and Daisy both change and Gatsby in particular's a very dynamic character, it's just that what we see in the novel is the finished product of years of changing, from the poor farmer's son in Minnesota to the janitor to the assistant to the WWI soldier and officer to the young man in love and finally into the person we see, the man with it all and yet desperately trying to get back what he lost in the past, his girlfriend.

And a lot of that could've been solved by the second part, a criticism *I DO* have with the book--

Nick Carraway as the author and not Gatsby himself.

Nick's not a very engaging narrator, and a lot of the sections where he's just narrating can seem a bit boring if you're not in the full swing of the book...and Nick's not that dynamic, he's meant to be a foil for Gatsby, his Horatio to Gatsby's Hamlet...

But it's HAMLET who gives the great speeches in the play where he's the title character, not Horatio...

So I think the novel might have been more dynamic if it'd been told from Gatsby's point of view, and then at least *he* could tell us--or better yet, the novel could show us--how Gatsby climbed up in life, and what he was thinking, so we could see how the character the main emphasis of the book is on shifts and reacts and changes over time.



But still, I like the book overall (I'll say this--"Heart of Darkness" was a bore fore me, and at least "The Great Gatsby" topped that...HoD is shorter but feels 10x longer...)

Oh, obi....Just when I was about to defend you and Gatsby, you had to bash Heart of Darkness...tsk tsk

I agree that Nick is, hands-down, the shitiest narrator of all time. Even the whole "I'm Gay" subplot (spoiler alert) is poorly done. There is not hing appealing about him at all.

I also really disliked the chick (forget her name). Nothing appealing about her at all.

Abgemacht won this thread, with an assist from Tom. Obi should be banned from speaking about literature for his remarks.

1. Which chick--Gatsby's ex-flame (Daisy) or the other girl Nick talks to (Jordan) or the lady from the Valley of Ashes that's poor (Myrtle)?

2. Eh...the "gay" door is open there, but I don't think it's anything more than Holmes/Watson territory, ie, you can have them gay or straight, either way, so I'm not sure if it's a "gay" subplot so much as Nick trying to find someone to relate to in this new environment and Gatsby finding Nick a comfort because he's not someone who only likes him for his money and who he feels he can trust.

3. That being said...yeah, not a good narrator...

4. What do you like about HoD, Tom? I like Kurtz as a character, and the symbolism is nice...but it's such a tedious read, Condrad's style is one of those who I can stand the least, it feels so over-the-top descriptive that it's tedious, and wouldn't you know, "Apocalypse Now," based on the book and giving us images instead of pages of description that feel tedious when some plot or character action is desperately wanted and needed, is vastly superior, in my view. It's still an important book, but definitely not one of my favorites; Hardy and Conrad both straddle that line between the Victorian and Modern set of authors, and for me, Hardy easily wins out in that contest, no question.

See, I love the style. The empahsis on descriptiveness is what makes the work so great (well, paired with the character development and symbolism which you already mentioned) The work would be lacking if not for the descriptive nature because it is those descriptions which create such a hopeless, barbaric mood throughout.

It's got Carey Mulligan in it, so it can't be all bad. Here she is in my favourite Tennant era Dr Who episode. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZRhj03MZD4&feature=related

Jordan and Myrtle are fine. Daisy was a horrid character.

If you don't think Nick is gay, then you haven't read the book.

1) He's way too interested in Gatsby
2) He has no interest in the wildly attractive Jordan
3) He fucks that dude in the elevator scene.

A romp about self involved snooty rich people. Funny, it doesn't seem like an Obi kind of book