Selected GG Interps for Discussion

Hope has a role in everyday life. (FHS)

The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. (sparknotes)

Human decency is going down the drain. (FHS)

Fitzgerald wrote a love song to and a threnody for a time [the 1920s]. Like Janus, he looked back and forward simultaneously, back to all the dreams that had impossibly come true, ahead to all the nightmares that were surely to come. (Centennial Review 1970)

For Nick, what makes Gatsby great is that he still believes in the American Dream. (source uncertain)

The standards for honesty and morality seem to be dependent on class and gender. (gradesaver)

When Gatsby dies, more innocently than [Hamlet and Ahab] (since, though a "criminal," he lacks utterly their taste for destruction), he kills a promise more poignant and perhaps more precious, certainly more inclusive than theirs: Gatsby kills the promise that desire can ever be gratified. (Samuels, Gale Online)

If Gatsby is a book for us today, it is not so in the obvious moralizing way. We are not asked to repudiate our more excessive selves. Rather, we are to recover in altered form something of the power of that intoxication, that amorous bent toward greater possibilities of feeling and action. ...wounded and compromised as we may feel, there is a clue about renewal in that essential American image of dark fields rolling on under the night. (Atlantic 1993)

I find this to be a simple, flawed love story of deeply flawed, uninteresting characters. (Pablo Q, online-literature.com)

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald subtly tackles the theme of spirituality, making his message heard most forcefully by what is missing, rather than what is there. The characters have substituted materialism and instant creature comforts for philosophic principles, thus suggesting a lack of order and structure in the world. (Cliffsnotes.com)

The blend of yellow (hope) and gold (money worship) is significant. It is this quintessentially American mixture which proves to be the undoing of both the protagonist and his nation. (Rea, English Review)