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My book club in Austin argued about 'The Great Gatsby' for a full hour
Everyone kept saying Gatsby was a tragic hero, but one member, Sarah, said he was just a rich guy who made bad choices. She pointed out he spent over 300,000 dollars in today's money just to throw parties for a woman who didn't care. It happened last fall at our usual coffee shop meetup. She said, 'He built a whole life on a lie, that's not romance, it's sad.' I actually agreed with her, even though the group thought she was being too harsh. Has anyone else had a member completely change how you see a classic book?
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fionafoster6mo ago
Totally get where Sarah's coming from. There's this line from a podcast that stuck with me, about how Gatsby's house is just a big, empty set for a movie he's directing. All those shirts and parties were props. The guy had no real friends, just people who showed up for the free booze. It reframes the whole story from a love tragedy to a really lonely story about a man who bought the wrong dream.
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corah755mo ago
Yeah, that podcast line about the house being an empty set is perfect. It makes you look at all his stuff differently, like the car or the shirts. He wasn't collecting things he loved, he was just buying the props for the character he was trying to be. The real tragedy is he probably forgot what he actually wanted before he even got rich.
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troy7686mo ago
Oh man, Sarah's take is spot on. I read a piece once that broke down how Gatsby's whole world was a performance, like he was putting on a play for an audience of one. It really hit me that his tragedy isn't some grand romantic thing, it's that he never figured out who he was outside of wanting Daisy. He built a castle on sand and called it a life. That view totally changed the book for me.
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