–  ‘The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.’ – The Great Gatsby, p. 52. –

A novel set in the roaring twenties, the jazz era, the age of extravaganza and bravura, must evidently feature all its periods typical elements. And how to do this better, than to combine all of them by describing the well-known parties of the time.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the in 1925 published novel and born in 1896 in Minnesota, created a man who could easily have been the founder of the roaring parties on Long Island that attracted the rich and famous of New York and its vicinity: Jay Gatsby.

Having only the information the narrator, Gatsby’s neighbour Nick Carraway, gives us, it is hard to tell what kind of man Gatsby really is. Carraway describes for us the rumours that suggest Gatsby’s mysterious past, but none of them seems to be true. What keeps Carraway –and the reader–  interested, however, is Gatsby’s infinite dissatisfaction while having anything a man could wish for.

Carraway feels he is the only genuine friend Gatsby has ever had, despite the hundreds of people crashing Gatsby’s parties every Saturday.

‘People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.’ P.50.

He feels more than sorry about it, especially when Gatsby finds himself a very sad end of life.

‘I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone.’ ‘…I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all.’ p.210-212.

But what makes it so heart rending is the fact that it all, according to Carraway, leads to nothing: ‘It wasn’t any use. Nobody came,’ is what he says after he and Gatsby’s father are the only ones attending the man’s funeral .

The book is full of endless descriptions of the invented towns and cities, of the birds and trees that Fitzgerald must have seen while writing. It gives the book its romantic atmosphere and magical touch, but makes it also more difficult to read because of the opportunity for our minds to start fantasising on their own.

‘When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.’ P.31. Although this sentence is written in the beginning of the book (after Nick Carraway sees his neighbour for the first time), it could just as good have been written towards the end. It shows us the sad, mysterious feeling that we feel throughout the whole book and it makes us wonder about who this man could have really been.

It’s this mysteriousness, Fitzgerald’s talent for making endless sentences full of adjectives and metaphors to describe things and of course the intriguing yet sinister character of Jay Gatsby that make this book worth reading.