My favourite quotes from "The Great Gatsby"

"Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!"

"You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me."

"They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together."

"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others-young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."

"His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete."

"All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever."

"Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!"

"Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window."

"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?"

"It takes two to make an accident."

"I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

"Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."

"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead."

"The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly."

"I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity."

"I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

"I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands."

7 life lessons

Here are seven life lessons that can be taken away from "The Great Gatsby":

1. Optimism is a noble, if futile trait.

Throughout the book, Gatsby is characterized as being authentically hopeful, in spite of the adversity that he faces, and the lies he consistently tells. In the end, Nick almost idolizes him in spite of his dubious morality. Fitzgerald writes, "Gatsby turned out all right at the end," implying that, even though he died fighting for his passions, he went down nobly.

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament" -- it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

2. Money can't buy you love (or friends).

Gatsby attempts to woo Daisy with his lavish parties and home, but ultimately, he fails, mostly because Tom informs her of the truth: He made his fortune in an illegal manner. What's more, none of Gatsby's party attendees show up to his funeral, aside from Nick.

At first I was surprised and confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn't move or breathe or speak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested.

3. Unbridled passion isn't always a good thing.

Gatsby and Daisy's brief affair goes unnoticed for a time, until Tom catches Jay making eyes at his lover out in the open. Perhaps if Gatsby had contained himself, the pair could have followed through with their whimsical plans.

But Tom's passion, when let loose, has even more of a detrimental effect; his red-hot emotion is quick to take a violent turn, as he slaps and injures his mistress, Myrtle, when she playfully teases him.

"Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai - "

Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

4. It's not easy to leave your past behind you.

As the tragic conclusion and poetic closing lines to Fitzgerald's book tell us, the past can be a messy thing to escape. As hard as Gatsby tries to shirk off his reputation as a bootlegger, he's unable to do so.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

5. Don't critique others

The book kicks off with Nick professing his inability to critique anyone less fortunate than himself, which we learn eventually leads to his empathy for Gatsby. His open-mindedness gives him a deeper perspective on the people around him and protects him from falling subject to the glitzy, surface-level materialism of the '20s.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

6. Physical beauty is fickle and fleeting.

From the moment we're introduced to Daisy, she seems more like a beautiful caricature of herself rather than an actual person. She flits and giggles and wins the heart of Gatsby, but ultimately leaves him in the dust in spite of his immense efforts.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

7. You know what they say about assuming.

Fitzgerald's tragic story quickly goes from sad to sadder, and many of the terrible events that unfold are based solely on false assumptions. When George discovers that his wife has died after being hit by a car, he assumes that Gatsby was the driver and proceeds to take revenge on him. In fact, Gatsby was covering for Daisy. Says Nick:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

I liked this way of presenting character sketches! It is a very creative, astounding and extraodinary idea!

Nick Carraway

Nick Carraway

If Gatsby represents one part of Fitzgerald’s personality, the flashy celebrity who pursued and glorified wealth in order to impress the woman he loved, then Nick represents another part: the quiet, reflective Midwesterner adrift in the lurid East. A young man (he turns thirty during the course of the novel) from Minnesota, Nick travels to New York in 1922 to learn the bond business. He lives in the West Egg district of Long Island, next door to Gatsby. Nick is also Daisy’s cousin, which enables him to observe and assist the resurgent love affair between Daisy and Gatsby. As a result of his relationship to these two characters, Nick is the perfect choice to narrate the novel, which functions as a personal memoir of his experiences with Gatsby in the summer of 1922.

Nick is also well suited to narrating The Great Gatsby because of his temperament. As he tells the reader in Chapter 1, he is tolerant, open-minded, quiet, and a good listener, and, as a result, others tend to talk to him and tell him their secrets. Gatsby, in particular, comes to trust him and treat him as a confidant. Nick generally assumes a secondary role throughout the novel, preferring to describe and comment on events rather than dominate the action. Often, however, he functions as Fitzgerald’s voice, as in his extended meditation on time and the American dream at the end of Chapter 9.

Insofar as Nick plays a role inside the narrative, he evidences a strongly mixed reaction to life on the East Coast, one that creates a powerful internal conflict that he does not resolve until the end of the book. On the one hand, Nick is attracted to the fast-paced, fun-driven lifestyle of New York. On the other hand, he finds that lifestyle grotesque and damaging. This inner conflict is symbolized throughout the book by Nick’s romantic affair with Jordan Baker. He is attracted to her vivacity and her sophistication just as he is repelled by her dishonesty and her lack of consideration for other people.

Nick states that there is a “quality of distortion” to life in New York, and this lifestyle makes him lose his equilibrium, especially early in the novel, as when he gets drunk at Gatsby’s party in Chapter 2. After witnessing the unraveling of Gatsby’s dream and presiding over the appalling spectacle of Gatsby’s funeral, Nick realizes that the fast life of revelry on the East Coast is a cover for the terrifying moral emptiness that the valley of ashes symbolizes. Having gained the maturity that this insight demonstrates, he returns to Minnesota in search of a quieter life structured by more traditional moral values.

A few words about Luhrmann's film

Luhrmann's film is clearly meant to have exactly the impact on the audience as Gatsby's party has on Carraway. It should feel like an amusement park. It should be over the top. We should feel it is too much and entirely artificial, because that is exactly what those parties, and by extension Gatsby as a public figure, prove to be.

  

"In defence of a truly Great Gatsby" from The Sydney Morning Herald.

http://m.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/in-defence-of-a-truly-great-gatsby-20130530-2ndno.html

Daisy Buchanan

Daisy Buchanan

Partially based on Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, Daisy is a beautiful young woman from Louisville, Kentucky. She is Nick’s cousin and the object of Gatsby’s love. As a young debutante in Louisville, Daisy was extremely popular among the military officers stationed near her home, including Jay Gatsby. Gatsby lied about his background to Daisy, claiming to be from a wealthy family in order to convince her that he was worthy of her. Eventually, Gatsby won Daisy’s heart, and they made love before Gatsby left to fight in the war. Daisy promised to wait for Gatsby, but in 1919 she chose instead to marry Tom Buchanan, a young man from a solid, aristocratic family who could promise her a wealthy lifestyle and who had the support of her parents.

After 1919, Gatsby dedicated himself to winning Daisy back, making her the single goal of all of his dreams and the main motivation behind his acquisition of immense wealth through criminal activity. To Gatsby, Daisy represents the paragon of perfection—she has the aura of charm, wealth, sophistication, grace, and aristocracy that he longed for as a child in North Dakota and that first attracted him to her. In reality, however, Daisy falls far short of Gatsby’s ideals. She is beautiful and charming, but also fickle, shallow, bored, and sardonic. Nick characterizes her as a careless person who smashes things up and then retreats behind her money. Daisy proves her real nature when she chooses Tom over Gatsby in Chapter 7, then allows Gatsby to take the blame for killing Myrtle Wilson even though she herself was driving the car. Finally, rather than attend Gatsby’s funeral, Daisy and Tom move away, leaving no forwarding address.

Like Zelda Fitzgerald, Daisy is in love with money, ease, and material luxury. She is capable of affection (she seems genuinely fond of Nick and occasionally seems to love Gatsby sincerely), but not of sustained loyalty or care. She is indifferent even to her own infant daughter, never discussing her and treating her as an afterthought when she is introduced in Chapter 7. In Fitzgerald’s conception of America in the 1920s, Daisy represents the amoral values of the aristocratic East Egg set.

   

As for me, Daisy is like a flower daisy, which leaves are snow-white, innocent (if we remember the colour symbolism) but its central part is yellow,that means - rotten!

West and East Egg, on the northern shore of Long Island, are thought to be disguised versions of Great Neck and Manor Haven/Sands Point, both famous in the Jazz Age for wealth and luxury. Far enough outside the bustle of New York City, here the wealthy could have their space and waterfront views.

"It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York - and where there are,among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the nost domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemispere,the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals - like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end - but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead."

 Lands End in Long Island, which is considered to be the inspiration for Tom and Daisy Buchanan`s East Egg house ( demolished in 2011)

 Beacon Towers is considered to be inspiration for Jay Gatsby`s extravagent West Egg nouveau riche house (demolished in the 1940s).

Beacon Towers was a Gilded Age mansion that was situated on Sands Point in the village of Sands Point on the North Shore of Long Island, New York. It was designed by Hunt & Hunt, formed by the partnership of Richard Morris Hunt’s sons Richard and Joseph. It was the last house on Long Island to be designed by the firm.

Architectural historians have described the mansion as a pure Gothic fantasy, although it did owe some of its design elements to the alcazars of Spain and to depictions of castles in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The interior contained approximately 60 primary rooms and upwards of 140 in total. 

The mansion is thought by literary scholars to have played a part in the inspiration for the home of Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald described Gatsby’s mansion in the book as:

"A factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin bead of raw ivy, and marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of land."

 http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7363006n

 Serena Altschul visits the house that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's great American novel "The Great Gatsby" to discuss its storied past with owner Bert Brodsky and what may become of the land after the house is knocked down having being beaten beyond repair by the Long Island sound.