The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This story follows Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest living on Long Island surrounded by the idle rich.

Nick lives next to a millionaire named Jay Gatsby who hosts lavish parties at his mansion. Gatsby invites Nick to one of them and the two become friends, even though Nick despises Gatsby's life and pretty much everything he stands for.

Across the water lives Nick's second cousin Daisy with her husband Tom Buchanan, the two of them also quite wealthy. Nick discovers that Gatsby and Daisy have known one another and are in love.

The majority of the story is concerned with the carefree lives of these wealthy people and Nick's understanding that they are ultimately selfish people who do not take responsibility for their own actions, allowing others ot clean up after them or deal with the fallout from their mistakes. This is evident when a tragic accident occurs and the blame is left on Gatsby who was not responsible for it, yet suffers as a result.

The story is short and relatively simple. The writing was very good and I liked that the story wasn't just about rich people being perfect, but having their lifestyles critiqued and even looked down on by an ordinary person, even though Nick was a part of their world for a time. Supposedly the story comments on the decay of social and moral values, and I would like to have had more of that. The characters were deplorable, as I knew they would be. Their greed and gluttony were evident. It was interesting to me that F. Scott Fitzgeralkd would write the characters in this way. For some reason I imagined him being like them himself.

I'm giving The Great Gatsby 4 stars. I was hoping for more of a plot than I got.