Blog: Why “The Great Gatsby” isn’t Just Another Required Read

Beauty and betrayal rarely meet in one place. Frances Scott Fitzgerald manages to take this even further and throw in murder and love, hedonism and God, and then wrap it all inside a jazz composition with his novel “The Great Gatsby.”You probably recognize the title from junior English required reading lists. Or the heading on all those Sparknote pages you skimmed. Or at least from a question you guessed on during Ms. Birt’s final. But do not discount “Gatsby” just because your English teacher hands it to you. Fitzgerald manages to capture America at its best and worst and show them both simultaneously in a single cocktail party. With his central character he epitomizes the American spirit and forever places himself among the literary greats.

The novel, for those who haven’t read it, centers around Nick, a recent graduate from Yale, as he tries to make his way in the jazz age that arose after WW1. Rather than play an active character, Nick merely watches as those around him, Jay Gatsby and Gatsby’s love Daisy being the most crucial, take part in affairs, drunken rages, murders, car wrecks and other life-wrecking activities.

So why should you care? The book takes place in a long past decade and besides, “The Hunger Games” are way more exciting and bloody, right? That is like being offered the Mona Lisa and choosing to look at the art displayed by East students in the hallway. Not that “The Hunger Games” or local art don’t have their place. But Fitzgerald has offered a way to escape to New York in the twenties and follow a group of young people making increasingly painful decisions all described in the most beautiful and exciting language of the last century.

So yes, “The Hunger Games” are enjoyable, exciting and I myself could not set them down for a moment. But the book that will forever sit on my shelf, go with me to college and probably be quoted in my marriage vows is not some cheap gore entertainment novel. It is the greatest novel produced by an American author. “The Great Gatsby” can be read again and again and will never cease to entertain, never cease to make the reader shout in frustration. “The Great Gatsby” is, quite simply put, a masterpiece.