Daniel: The book that many people call 'The Great American Novel' was a total commercial dud when it was first published. Critics called the characters flat, the plot improbable, and the writing a bit forced. Sophia: Wait, really? I always assumed The Great Gatsby was an instant classic, that it landed and everyone immediately knew it was a masterpiece. Daniel: Not at all. It sold poorly, and F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing it was a failure. It took decades, and its distribution to soldiers during World War II, for it to find its audience and become the icon it is today. Sophia: That's incredible. So how does a book go from being a flop to being required reading in nearly every high school in America? What are we all seeing in it now that they missed back then? Daniel: I think that’s the perfect question. We are, of course, talking about the legendary novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And the key to understanding its power, I think, is realizing just how personal this book was for him. Sophia: How so? Daniel: Well, when he was writing it, Fitzgerald was living this crazy life on Long Island, right in the heart of the Roaring Twenties. He was surrounded by the extravagant parties and the 'new money' millionaires he writes about. But at the same time, he was drowning in debt and, coming from the Midwest, always felt like a bit of an outsider looking in, just like his narrator, Nick Carraway. Sophia: Ah, so he had a front-row seat to the whole spectacle, but he wasn't entirely part of it. That feeling of being an outsider looking in... it makes me think of those legendary parties. They sound amazing on the surface, but were they really? Or was something else going on?

Daniel: That’s the perfect place to start, because the parties are the novel’s glittering, deceptive heart. Every weekend, Gatsby’s mansion explodes with life. The book describes crates of oranges and lemons arriving, a full orchestra, bars stocked with illegal gin, and people flocking to his home like moths to a flame. Sophia: It sounds like the most epic party you could imagine. But who were all these people? Did Gatsby even know them? Daniel: That's the thing. Almost no one was actually invited. Nick Carraway, the narrator, is one of the few who gets a formal invitation, and it makes him an anomaly. The rest are just... there. They come from all over New York to treat Gatsby's house like an amusement park. They drink his liquor, eat his food, and then they spread the wildest rumors about him. Sophia: What kind of rumors? Daniel: Oh, everything. That he was a German spy during the war. That he once killed a man. That he was a nephew of Von Hindenburg. Nobody knows the truth, and nobody really cares. The party itself is the main attraction, not the host. It’s a performance of wealth, but the audience has no connection to the performer. Sophia: So it’s not a party, it’s a spectacle. A giant, expensive trap. And this gets at that famous tension in the book, right? The difference between the two settings, West Egg and East Egg. Daniel: Exactly. Gatsby lives in West Egg, which is home to the "new money"—people who made their fortunes, often in questionable ways, like bootlegging during Prohibition. They're flashy, they're loud, and they throw parties like Gatsby's. Across the bay is East Egg, home to the "old money" crowd, like our other main characters, Daisy and Tom Buchanan. Sophia: And what’s their deal? They have the money, but they’re different. Daniel: They're different because their wealth is inherited. It's established, aristocratic, and it comes with a sense of effortless superiority. Tom Buchanan is the perfect example. He's a brutish, arrogant man who is openly racist and cheating on his wife, Daisy, with a woman named Myrtle Wilson. He feels completely entitled to his power and looks down on Gatsby with total disdain. To Tom, Gatsby's wealth is just vulgar. Sophia: I find Tom to be one of the most hateable characters in literature. He's just a bully who uses his money and status as a shield. He has this affair, and he’s not even discreet about it. He drags Nick along to meet Myrtle in this desolate, grim place. Daniel: The Valley of Ashes. It's this industrial wasteland between West Egg and New York City, a place covered in soot and grime, lorded over by the giant, fading eyes of an old billboard for an optometrist, Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. It's where the working class, like Myrtle's husband George Wilson, live and work, literally in the shadow of the rich. Sophia: It’s the dumping ground for the Roaring Twenties. All the glamour and excess of the Eggs has to produce waste, and the Valley of Ashes is it. And the people there, like George Wilson, are just completely powerless. They get crushed by the carelessness of the wealthy. Daniel: And that's Fitzgerald's first major critique. The American Dream is supposed to be about social mobility, but in this world, the class lines are rigid. Gatsby can buy a mansion bigger than Tom's, but he can never buy his way into their club. His money is tainted. We find out he's partners with a gangster named Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Sophia: Wow. So his entire fortune is built on a criminal enterprise. It’s a house of cards. The dream is a fraud from the very beginning. Daniel: A beautiful, glittering fraud. And that's the Gilded Cage. From the outside, it looks like paradise. But from the inside, it's hollow, corrupt, and morally bankrupt.

Sophia: Okay, so the society is corrupt and the dream is hollow. But at the center of it all is this epic love story. Or... is it? Gatsby's whole mission, the reason for the parties, the mansion, the money—it's all to get Daisy back. He famously tells Nick, "Can't repeat the past? Why, of course you can!" Daniel: And he believes it with every fiber of his being. That line is the key to his entire character. The story, as we learn from Jordan Baker, is that Gatsby, then a poor army officer named James Gatz, fell in love with Daisy, a beautiful, wealthy socialite in Louisville, five years earlier. He was sent to war, and she promised to wait for him. Sophia: But she didn't. She married the incredibly wealthy Tom Buchanan instead. Daniel: Exactly. And Gatsby has spent the last five years transforming himself from James Gatz into the magnificent Jay Gatsby, all for one purpose: to win her back. He bought his mansion in West Egg specifically so he could be right across the bay from her. Every night, he stands on his lawn and looks at a single green light at the end of her dock. Sophia: That green light. It’s such a powerful symbol. It’s this distant, almost magical promise of the future he wants, which is really just his past. But is he in love with Daisy, the person, or is he in love with a memory of her? Daniel: That is the million-dollar question. Because the Daisy of the present is very different. She's become cynical and superficial. There's that heartbreaking moment where she tells Nick about the birth of her daughter. She says she wept and then said, "I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." Sophia: That line is chilling. It shows she's fully aware of how empty her world is, and she thinks ignorance is the only way to survive it. This is the woman Gatsby has built his entire world for? It seems like such a mismatch. Daniel: It is. And you see the cracks appear when he finally reunites with her. Nick arranges for them to have tea at his cottage. At first, it's painfully awkward. But then Gatsby takes her on a tour of his mansion, this monument he's built for her. He starts throwing his expensive, custom-made shirts from England onto the bed in a giant, colorful pile. Sophia: And Daisy starts crying. I've never understood that scene. She cries over... shirts? What is that about? Daniel: I think it's the moment his dream physically crashes into her. It's not about the shirts themselves. It's the overwhelming, tangible proof of the life she could have had. It's the weight of his devotion, his five years of singular focus, all piled up in front of her. She's crying for what was lost. Sophia: That makes so much more sense. It’s the sheer force of his obsession made real. But even then, it’s not enough, is it? The real climax happens at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Daniel: The hottest day of the summer. The tension is boiling over. Tom, now fully aware of the affair, confronts Gatsby. He demands to know what's going on. And Gatsby, full of confidence, declares that Daisy never loved Tom, that she's been waiting for him all along. He wants her to erase the last five years. Sophia: But she can't. That's the moment it all breaks, isn't it? Daniel: It's the turning point of the novel. Tom forces her to choose, and Daisy breaks down. She admits, "Oh, you want too much! I love you now—isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She confesses that she did love Tom once. And with those words, Gatsby's dream is shattered. Sophia: Because his dream required her to have a pure, untainted past. It needed her to have been his, and only his, all along. The fact that she had a life, that she had feelings for her husband, pollutes the fantasy. It's so tragic. He can't accept that the past is unchangeable.

Daniel: And that's the core of the tragedy. Gatsby tries to use the corrupt tools of the American Dream—all this new money and spectacle—to achieve something he thinks is pure: repeating the past. But the system is rigged, and the past is a ghost. You can't buy it back. Sophia: You can't. And once his dream is broken, the "careless people," as Nick calls them, just retreat. After the confrontation, Daisy, driving Gatsby's car, accidentally hits and kills Myrtle Wilson. But she doesn't stop. She lets Gatsby take the blame. Daniel: And Tom and Daisy just disappear back into their vast carelessness and their money, leaving Gatsby to face the consequences. Myrtle's grief-stricken husband, George, is led to believe Gatsby was the one having an affair with his wife and that he killed her. He finds Gatsby floating in his pool and shoots him, before killing himself. Sophia: It's such a brutal, empty end. Gatsby, the man who threw the biggest parties, has a funeral that almost no one attends. All those people who used his house as an amusement park are nowhere to be found. In the end, he was completely alone. He was chasing a green light that was always moving away from him. Daniel: Exactly. Which brings us to that incredible, haunting final line of the book. After all the tragedy, Nick is on the beach, looking out at the water, and he thinks about Gatsby's dream. He writes: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Sophia: Wow. That gives me chills every time. Daniel: Fitzgerald is saying this isn't just Gatsby's story. It's the human condition. We are all reaching for some idealized future, some green light, but we are constantly being pulled back by the currents of our own history, our own memories. Sophia: It leaves you with this feeling of beautiful, heartbreaking futility. It makes you wonder, what green light are we all chasing? And is it something real, or just a memory we can never get back to? Daniel: A question that's just as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago. We'd love to hear what you think. Find us on our socials and share your 'green light' moment. What's the dream that keeps you going? Sophia: We can't wait to read your thoughts. Daniel: This is Aibrary, signing off.