In summary, The Great Gatsby It is a masterpiece and we are going to explain why. Few novels have had so much with so little. Not even 200 pages The Great Gatsby of Fitzgerald. In 1925, the same year that John Dos Passos launched his great Manhattan Transfer, Francis Scott Fitzgerald He published his own version of things.
His version of a United States in which money was driving everyone crazy while, in the background, the classic stories of love, friendship and lifelong rivalries continued to take place. In his novel, Dos Passos used about 40 characters. To Scott Fitzgerald, in a way (and with permission from Nick Carraway), it was worth only one: the majestic and unforgettable Jay Gatsby.
? The Great Gatsby Summary: Scot Fitzgerald's best book
If you don't feel like reading, you can always listen. It is not a summary of The Great Gatsby but the complete book read
The Great Gatsby Complete Audiobook
In a critical-literary panorama in which writing a critical summary of The Great Gatsby would have the same meaning as trying to describe Jesus Christ, in Postposmo we chose to highlight ten moments that help to explain the message and in the summary of such a special book. . Here is a decalogue with the key moments of The Great Gatsby loaded with spoilers.
-
- Movies about writers: the wonderful job of being a writer 'made in Hollywood'
- Montano's disease, Enrique Vila-Matas | Review
- Literature classes, Julio Cortázar in Berkeley | Review
- What do the colors of the Anagram Compacts mean?
1. Where is Jay Gatsby?
Nick Carraway, the first-person narrator of this story, has spent several pages sowing in the reader the seed of curiosity about the character that gives the novel its name. Especially when he says this: “I would not try to enter the human heart again. Only Gatsby, my neighbor, would be the exception. Gatsby, who represented everything I despised."
So great is this Jay Gatsby that, for now, we only know through Nick's bombastic story, that F. Scott Fitzgerald can afford to delay his appearance until chapter 3. And when he finally enters the scene, he does it in the best possible way: with surprise. We know it will be a grand entrance, we are more than forewarned, and yet F. Scott Fitzgerald gets away with it.
Nick, who has finally been invited by Gatsby to one of his wild parties, is obsessed with locating the host of the soiree. What less to say hello, thank you for everything. After a good while of searching through the crowd, Nick has already given up and chooses to let himself go:
“I was still with Jordan Baker. We were at a table with a guy about my age and a boisterous girl who laughed uncontrollably at the slightest provocation. I was having fun. I had drunk two ewers of champagne, and the scene had transformed before my eyes into something meaningful, elemental and profound."
Half a page later, Nick starts talking to the young man his age:
This party is strange to me. I haven't even greeted the host. I live next door. -I waved an arm in the direction of the invisible boundary that separated the estates-, and this Gatsby sent me the driver with an invitation.
For a moment he looked at me as if he couldn't understand what I was saying.
"Gatsby is me," he said suddenly.
About 55 pages later (pocket edition) of having started the novel, when what one expected was to see Gatsby appear mounted on an elephant, accompanied by a thousand dancers with drums and trumpets in the background, the millionaire sneaks into the story like a lame dog abandoned in a kitchen.
2. Gorza à la Fitzgerald
In the previous point we have cited a great description of what has been a nice drunkenness. For championship pedals, F. Scott Fitzgerald (who knows what he's talking about) prefers to show a parade of scenes where the grotesque, incoherent, hyperbole and ellipsis come together.
Things happen because they happen, without having to look for many reasons beyond the graduation of spirits, capable of bringing out the best and worst of each character in The Great Gtasby. We get a good look at it the first time Nick goes to a party with Tom and his mistress at a friend's house:
It was nine o'clock; almost immediately afterwards I looked at the clock and found that it said ten o'clock. (...) The little dog was on the table looking without seeing through the smoke that filled the room, and from time to time he moaned weakly. People disappeared, reappeared, planned to go somewhere, and then got lost, searched for and found again a meter away. Sometime around midnight, Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson had a falling out, arguing in passionate voices as to whether Myrtle had the right to mention Daisy's name.
– Daisy! Daisy! Daisy! Mrs. Wilson shouted. I'll say it whenever I feel like it! Daisy! Give…!
With a brief, precise movement of his hand, Tom broke her nose.
Original book cover of The Great Gatsby
3. Birthdays
In short, this book is the story of a summer. The summer in which Nick Carraway coincided garden with garden with Gatsby marked him so much that he dedicated this novel to him as a posthumous memory.
As much as Nick Carraway is the narrator, the protagonist is Jay Gatsby. To the constant curtain of fog that accompanies the millionaire (a person of whom we can never be sure of his past or his present), we must add the somewhat mysterious personality of Nick Carraway, who is completely overshadowed: from We will get to know very few details that, more than helping us to draw his character, help to magnify the impact that meeting Gatsby had on him.
After serving in World War 1, Nick moves to New York to try his hand at finances. He is away from his family and doesn't know anyone, only his cousin Daisy. F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us nothing about his life or his day-to-day life. Only what he has a strict relationship with Gatsby. Nick is a person who, just after witnessing a heated argument between Daisy (Gatsby's beloved) and Tom, realizes that today was his birthday. Gatsby and Nick are very lonely people, but each in his own way.
The love story between Nick and Jordan (one could almost say the No. love story) hardly appears as a subplot. Nick is blessed with a strong collection of principles and values that we hardly have the pleasure of knowing except in extracts like this:
His gray eyes, hooded in the sun, continued to stare ahead, but Jordan had deliberately altered our relationship, and for a moment I thought he loved her. Anyway, I am a slow-thinking person full of internal rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that before I had to make things very clear in my hometown. He still wrote weekly letters and continued to sign them: "All love, Nick." (...) We all imagine ourselves possessing at least one of the cardinal virtues; In my case, I think I am one of the few honest people I know.
4. White card
What does that great Gatsby that everyone talks about do? What do we have to do to get invited to one of his parties? F. Scott Fitzgerald manages to infect us with that aura of Gatsbyan VIP socialite not by describing it, but by showing it. What is good literature but this itself? Here's Jay Gatsby at the wheel:
With fenders like outstretched wings we spread light across half Astoria; only half, because as we weaved between the pillars of the elevated railway I heard the familiar roar of a motorcycle speeding up, and a frantic policeman caught up with us.
"Okay, boy," Gatsby yelled at him, slowing down.
He took a white card out of his wallet and waved it at the lawman's eyes.
"You're absolutely right," admitted the policeman, raising his hand to his cap. "I'll recognize you next time, Mr. Gatsby." Excuse me!
5. Do you have something to say?
One day a journalist shows up at the house of the great Gatsby simply to put a microphone in front of him. Without reason. Just to see if he has something to say about whatever it is. It's a clever and hilarious way that Scott Fitzgerald uses to show us the extent to which Gatsby's name is circulated by word of mouth in New York's upper echelons.
Around this time a young and ambitious New York journalist turned up at Gatsby's house one morning and asked him if he had anything to say.
"Anything to say about what?" Gatsby asked politely.
-Only if you have to make a statement.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jay Gatsby in the latest film adaptation of The Great Gatsby
6. Gatsby and Daisy
The first meeting between Jay Gatsby and Daisy, his old love, is the most exciting moment in the novel (along with the ending, of course). If the great Gatsby ever showed interest in being friends with Nick Carraway, it was solely and exclusively to get closer to his cousin, let's not forget it (this adds another point of mystery about the affable personality that the millionaire seems to have disinterestedly with everything member of the human race).
The first time Nick brings the lovebirds together under the same roof, the tension goes without saying. Again, F. Scott Fitzgerald doesn't tell us that Nick is terribly uncomfortable not knowing what to do in the middle of it, he just shows us. It is enough for him to use a single adjective to completely change the atmosphere of the place:
"We haven't seen each other for many years," said Daisy, as casually as possible.
-Five in November.
The mechanical nature of Gatsby's response set us all back at least another minute. When he had already made them rise with the desperate suggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen, the devilish Finn brought it on a tray.
7. The Great Gatsby Reveal
In itself it says a lot about these people who live in the book of The Great Gatsby that, faced with the tedium of a summer afternoon with nothing to do at home, the winning plan is to travel in two cars to New York to rent a room in hotel in which to drink mint juleps.
And it is here, in the midst of a sultry "vegetable heat" of midsummer in Manhattan, where Gatsby finally decides to put his cards on the table in relation to his beloved's current partner. Nick, Jordan and Daisy witness the verbal struggle between the two gentlemen:
- Well, I have something to tell you, boy... Gatsby commented. But Daisy guessed her intentions.
-No Please! –She interrupted him with a helpless air– Please, let's all go home. Why don't we all go home?
"Excellent idea," I said, standing up. Come on, Tom. Nobody wants to have a drink.
"I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me."
"Your wife doesn't love you," Gatsby said. She has never loved him. She wants me.
-He's crazy! Tom exclaimed mechanically.
8. Yellow car
It should not be a coincidence that the event that ends up turning everything upside down in the plot occurs during the return of this absurd trip. A trip that, like almost all the activities carried out by this group of wealthy people, had no reason to be beyond that of adding to the list of banal activities with which to fill a life without much to do apart from spending the afternoons reclining on the sofa, decked out for the dance and strolling through the department stores.
The homicidal outrage of an innocent woman momentarily reconnects them with the reality of the world around them; a reality that Nick has never abandoned and that he has been narrating to us since the novel began, thus evidencing the cruel contrast between the real world and that other ephemeral caricature of golden existence, alcoholic pleasure and millionaires incapable of being happy.
After the surprise of the yellow car, owned by the great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald pulls a brilliant combo out of his sleeve, and leaves us out of the game again by revealing that the person behind the wheel was not him, but Daisy. .
The Great Gatsby, a book also published by Alfaguara
9. Last conversation
It has such drama and liturgy that only the most clueless reader does not even smell something:
'I'm going to drain the pool, Mr Gatsby. Leaves will begin to fall very soon, and soon there will be problems with the pipes.
"Don't do it today," Gatsby replied. He turned to me apologetically. "Do you know I haven't used the pool once all summer?"
I looked at the clock and stood up.My train leaves in twelve minutes.
I didn't want to go to the city. I knew I was incapable of serious work. But it was something else: he didn't want to leave Gatsby alone. I missed that train and then I missed another one before I left for good.
"I'll call him," I finally said.
"Don't stop doing it, boy.
I'll call you around noon.
We walk slowly down the steps.
"I suppose Daisy will phone too." – She looked at me anxiously, as if waiting for me to confirm her hope.
-I guess so.
-Well, see you.
We shook hands and I started walking. Before I reached the gate I remembered something and turned back.
"They're bad people," I yelled at him from across the garden. You are worth more than all of them combined.
10.Funeral
The moments before and after the murder are presented in a much more intense way, as if Scott Fitzgerald had already taken the goodbye of the great Gatsby for granted in the narration.
There is a macabre and disconcerting point in the fact that, among the discreet handful of people who attend the funeral, there is (in addition to Nick) the strange owl-eyed man whom we meet at the first party leafing through some volumes locked up in awe. alone in the library of the great Gatsby.
We got back to the cars as fast as we could. Owl Eyes spoke to me by the gate.
"I couldn't get to the house," he apologized.
-It has not been possible for anyone, it seems.
-Don't tell me stories! he exclaimed. My God! If they came to his house by hundreds!
He took off his glasses and cleaned them again, inside and out.
"Poor bastard," he said.
The presence of this little character makes the picture of the funeral even more devastating than if no one had come. It is tragically beautiful. Like the novel.