The Great Gatsby and why it's so great. Part one.

When you become known as someone who's enchanted with literature, so much to the point of perusing a degree in lit, you often get asked a question by people who don't quite know what they're getting themselves into.

What's your favourite book?

Now, I've read a lot of books. And I've enjoyed a lot of books. I've read books that have made me happy, books that have made me sad, and books that have changed me so profoundly that I owe who I am today to them. So I don't understand why I receive weird looks whenever I start rattling off a list that is being revised as it's said. But if I had to choose, at gun point, knife point or wand point, I would choose Gatsby.

Even though I grew up at Hogwarts.

Even though Holden stopped me from committing suicide.

Even though Augustus Waters made me cry for 20 minutes

and even though Julia Forester made me see what a real heroine was like.

Gatsby's my book. My favourite. My Gatsby.

And with the movie coming out next year as well as there being so many hate posts about it, I want to explain to you what makes Gatsby so Great.

First what it means: Symbolism and what we can take from this book. Then we'll do some proper close reading.

 If you're on the anti-lit brigade (Metaphres are stupid! OMG that's not what the author intended! Everyone is just making stuff up! This has no value in the real world!):

This is John Green. This is an author. He puts symbolism in his books. He thinks that critical reading is important. He loves Gatsby as much as I do.

From here:

You often hear in high school English classes, for instance, that thinking about symbols is dumb or useless or “ruining the book.” But underneath it all, this is why we have language in the first place. We don’t really need language to share the news of your back pain: You can point at your back and grimace to tell me that your back hurts, and I can nod sympathetically.
But to explain to you the nature and nuance of my grief or pain or joy, I need abstractions. I need symbols. And the better our symbols are, the more clearly we’ll be able to communicate with each other, and the more fully we’ll be able to imagine each other’s experience. Good symbolism makes empathy easier. 

So why the strings? The strings inside a person breaking struck me as a better and more accurate abstract description of despair than anthropomorphized symbols (broken heart, etc.).
And this is very important to remember when reading or writing or painting or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.

You are the composite of a hundred thousand different symbols. Every word, every gesture. The food you eat, your clothes, your hair, your make-up. All of it is symbolic. All these things add up to who you are and how you'd like to been seen. Your gender, your sexuality, your class and your taste and how you relate to others. Nothing you do is not symbolic in some way. It might seem like it isn't because the meanings of what you are doing are so indexed into society that they are transparent, but trust me, they are. And most of these are symbols that you choose.

But how does this wishy-washy liberal arts shit help you love The Great Gatsby?

Because, as Nick Points out, in chapter three, "most affectations conceal something eventually". 

 All the characters have affectations, all the characters are hiding something. Gatsby has his "old sport" to try and hide the fact that he's New Money. Daisy has her cool, melodic exterior to hide her inner discontent. Jordan acts haughty with her head thrown back, to show the world how cool and unaffected she is by life, her confidence hides her cheating and carelessness. Nick stays silent and polite to hide his disgust with the crowd he goes along with.

Tom... well Tom doesn't hide much. But Tom is also the biggest asshat on the planet.

And that's a point that can be brought up in this book. Is it arguing that everyone on the inside is just as ugly and unbearable as Tom? Certainly the character's inner selves do not serve much as role models. Can we project that to our lives? Underneath our clothes and hair and choices are we all bitter Daisy Buchanans and arrogant Toms, careless Jordans and prideful Nicks?

That, my dear reader, is up to you. I'm not going to tell you what to take away from a book or how to view humanity.

But as Nick says, and as John Green points out, Gatsby has an "extraordinary gift for hope". I take The Great Gatsby as a novel about hope. The ending is irrelevant, to an extent. "All lives end. All hearts are broken". That's life. It's a sad part of life, but it is inescapable. It's what you make of life that matters, not how much money you have, and that's something which provides contention in the book.

It's also the American Dream. That we can all be successful, no matter our class or standing. Except, as shown in the book, if you measure success by monetary value, things don't turn out too well.

Gatsby, to me, is a hopeful book that faces the human condition with a simple honesty. How do I come to this conclusion? Because of Nick.

 “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

We are all the narrators of our own stories. We all go to mystical places, like the party at Gatsby's. We all experience such strange and wonderful things. And sometimes they end. But it's not always the end. The difference between Gatsby's death, Tom and Daisy's evacuation and the break up with Jordan is the way that Nick feels about them after they have gone. He's not going to see any of them again, so they all might have died, for all the good that them being alive does for Nick. In his mind they are all dead. But Nick is not. Nick moves on, his life starts again.

Just like Gatsby did after the war. He rebuilt and kept on going in order to soothe his aching heart.

And we can take these things from the book. That we need to look behind peoples affectations to get to know them. That life starts again. That we are all broken little fools, but we can achieve so much, can rise to such greatness. "That tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out out arms further.... And one fine morning -

so we beat on, boats against the current born ceaselessly into the past."

Why I think English is important.

It's funny. I'm one of the biggest promoters of English that I know, yet I don't think I'm going to take it at university.

Why? Because I'm lazy. But also because you don't need someone to tell you what the symbols in texts mean. Once you've done a high school level of it, you really can figure all this stuff out on your own.

But why is English important? I hear you ask. Perhaps you are even scathingly throwing me the old "English teaches you how to think" line in a very sarcastic manner. Don't worry, I'm the first to disagree with that. How can you be taught how to think? It's a rather ridiculous notion. I do, however, like to argue that English teaches you how to ask questions.

And I do believe that English makes you a better person. This is a short list of why:

1) English helps you to understand other people.
The reason we can never fully understand another person, no matter how hard we try is because we cannot live inside their heads. It is impossible to hear every single thought that runs through their mind, even if they do have a Twitter account.

Yet books allow us to do exactly that - get into another persons head. When we read books, especially first person books, it allows us to see the innermost workings of the narrators mind. We see how they see, feel how they feel and think like they do. Books allow us to access another person's mind and gives us another perspective on the world. It brings us out of our own head and opens us up to another person's emotions.

Take "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time" for instance, where the main character has Aspergers. People without Aspergers cannot even begin to understand what it must be like to have that condition but by reading about it, we gain insight and understanding into other people's lives. Same can be said for Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner", which is set in Afghanistan to the purpose of trying to dispel the notion that all Muslims are extremists.

It's only when we gain perspective into other people, that we can accept that people think and feel in the same way as we do.

2) Books provide insights into the past.
Let's face it. We will never know what it's like to be citizens of Ancient Rome. We will (hopefully) never know what it's like to be alive during WWII and as we move further and further into the future, we will forget more and more of what the past generations were like.

Hell, I can't even remember a world without internet!

When we lose our perspective on historical events, we forget what the past teachers us. How can we learn from our mistakes if do do not remember them?

"The book thief" is a classic example. It's about a young German girl growing up in suburban Germany. It's an unusual premise for a holocaust book, but, to me at least, it made me think about how the Nazi's were people too, how a lot of them were just doing what they had to do to survive.

This does undoubtedly tie back into my first point, but I do feel that the Holocaust has received the Hollywood treatment far too much. There's no sense of how personal it was, how it affected the whole world.

Literature can also be a direct response to world events and can tell you a lot more about how the world was feeling at that time, rather than some text book.

Like this:

This is the cover for the 9/11 Spiderman comic. I dare you to read this and say that a text book has a bigger emotional feel than any recent textbook. This issue was released right after the attack and was created by the writers, most of who lived in New York.

You know things are bad when even Spiderman, defender of NY has no answers for you.

3) English teaches us valuable lessons.
You know how when you read children's books, there's always a message in them for the children like "don't lie" or "look both ways before crossing the road"? Well big kid books, and adult books do the same thing.

"The Chronicles of Narnia" Teaches kids about many things, bravery, loyalty, honestly. In "Voyage of the Dawntreader" (my favourite) I still remember how Eustace was turned into a dragon because of his greed.

In more 'adult' books, "Blue Moon Rising" had a great deal of being yourself and triumphing over a world that wanted to crush you by being yourself. Rupert received his heart's desire, which in the end, turned out not to be money or authority, but a way to defeat the darkness.

Even in non-fantasy books, the Great Gatsby teaches us about the folly of money, and how it really does not buy us happiness.

And to draw it up to my favourite saying, we learn all these things by asking questions. If we do not ask ourselves why it is wrong for Amir to sacrifice Hassan, we will never realise why it is wrong. If we do not examine  why Holden Caulfield wears the red hunting hat, we will never know that it's the same colour as his dead brother's hair so he uses it as a security blanket, hoping that if he can keep the hat by him, he can keep his brother alive and stay in that little place of innocence.