Talk:The Great Gatsby

I can't really see the point in having all those titles and announcements ("Detailed synopsis") with hardly anything to follow. I strongly suggest you (i e anyone planning to add something) should do it the other way round: First write the damned thing, including all subheadings, then add it to the article. The way it's being done here is confusing and also gives the (initially wrong) impression that here is yet another article that has not been finished yet. Next thing someone will add that stupid stub message. <KF> 17:38, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Agreed. Here is the unfinished synopsis, removed from article:

Detailed synopsis

Chapter I – The book opens with one of the most famous passages from any work of American literature:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

Hope it will blossom! --18.51.0.194 17:50, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Nick Carraway-Protagonist?

"The protagonist of the novel is Nick Carraway..." This is a very argumentative claim. One could argue over whether Nick or Gatsby is the protagonist. Nick does very little in the story, whereas Gatsby drives the majority, if not all, of the plot. Gatsby is probably the protagonist, Nick being a 'partially involved narrator.'

Okay, I can see you have changed "protagonist" back to "narrator" in the summary. When I wrote that summary a long time ago (see [1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Great_Gatsby&oldid=310446)) I wrote "first person narrator". I have no idea why, but dozens of people have found it necessary to add or change something here, which made this text somewhat messy. If you have a look at other articles on works of literature, hardly anyone ever expands them or changes something. Would it be valid to conclude that The Great Gatsby is one of the few novels people have actually READ? <KF> 23:30, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Gatsby and the American Dream

The story of western civilization since the Renaissance has been one of optimistic hope. With each passing decade, it seemed that science, technology, knowledge and liberty was bringing man closer to a utopia. With the dawn of the twentieth century, just as it seemed that man finally had the means to achieve the dreams of the past, the optimistic drive for the future collapsed into disillusionment and dismal pessimism. Nowhere was the fall more catastrophic than in America where the dreams had been greatest and the fall had been shattering. Fitzgerald and Miller are both able to use their characters to express the grandeur and the ordeal of the tarnished American Dream. The differences in the characters of Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman are in a deeper sense the differences in the different eras of the American Century. As Willy Loman is sixty in 1949 and Jay Gatsby in his thirties in the 1920s it can be surmised that Gatsby and Loman are around the same age. Both most lived a significant part of their childhood in a different century than they came of age in. The America they grew up in stands in stark contrast to the they America they die in. No wonder they have such difficulties in the modern world. The lives they live in are products of two very different wars. Gatsby lives in the shadow of his experiences in the First World War, and while Loman is too old to have served in the Second World War, the America he lives in is shaped by it. America has always been a country of material success. Even the sturdy Puritans found ways to pursue material goods. While in the Old World morals and material success stood apart in America they became intertwined. The “eye of the needle” the rich man had to pass to enter heaven was interpreted by the Puritans to have been a tight gate in Jerusalem which camels had a hard time getting through. Material success was proof of god’s favor. America’s material success made them the new Hebrews in a wilderness. These Americans were on a “City on a hill” a model to the rest of the world. --Gary123 03:14, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)