The Great Gatsby: opulent

Scott Fitzgerald’s writing is gilded, carefully decorated, meticulously opulent. It’s some of the prettiest prose I’ve read. The phrases and the contrast create some melodious plot, every word like a bell.

When Nick, our narrator, made an embarrassing blunder and confused our host Gatsby for a random partygoer, Gatsby gently lay his ego down.

He “smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly… one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

The Great Gatsby. The glitz and glamour that can make someone dizzy for a while with the ceaseless number of folks wandering into parties. The most charismatic Gatsby is constantly surrounded by acquaintances but it doesn’t amount to a single person who would make sacrifices for him, rather than view him merely as a means to an end. He’s delusionally driven to make up for his shortcomings but is never able to achieve that status that which Daisy and Tom are born into, when the Buchanans can smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money, or their vast carelessness. Gatsby’s aspirations are only fragile.

I think that this book is something decadent and intricately crafted. The writing is pretty, and the lofty high romance Gatsby devotes is captivating and moving, but Daisy’s character — flamboyant, meek, meretricious, and pliant — is only disappointing. Nick may be the most amiable character in the whole book as the only honest, straightforward person who is capable of being half in love, tremendously sorry, and not fazed by the superfluous.