I know that I read this book many years ago, but I've recently listened to it again on tape. (Not a word seemed familiar, by the way, which shows how much of an impression it left on me the first time.) So, it's a beautifully written book, but........I just don't get it. I've heard this book referred to so many times as one of the best books ever written, and I just can't see it.
Perhaps this is because I find it difficult to give the characters the same weight that Fitzgerald does. By that I mean that I have much less sympathy for Gatsby than I think I'm meant to, and both more sympathy for, and yet a vast impatience with, Daisy. The whole business of Gatsby's yearning for Daisy, the light at the end of the dock stuff, seems to me less fine and romantic, and more .... creepy. Any woman who's been even mildly stalked, and most decent looking women are at some time in their lives, knows how unpleasant this sort of thing is to be on the receiving end of, after the first fifteen minutes of feeling flattered. And I know that we're supposed to feel that Daisy has somehow betrayed Gatsby, that she was supposed to bravely dash off into a shining future with him but, sorry bud, this is why you shouldn't fool around with married people. Daisy has priorities and loyalties that Gatsby hasn't even considered, not the least of which is that little girl who so conveniently is off-stage throughout the whole book. In my opinion, Gatsby was a fool, and it was long past time he had that sort of foolishness slapped out of him.
I can't help looking at Daisy through a post-feminist lens, and that's the source of my impatience. She seems to have no centre or sense of self except as defined by her relationships with men. No wonder she's so unhappy, and her life is so empty. What Daisy needs is a divorce, and a career. A little therapy wouldn't hurt either.
At any rate, I can't see much of a tragedy in the fates of a bunch of people who have brought their troubles on themselves by behaving like children. Gatsby is a romantic child, Daisy a selfish one, and Tom a greedy little boy. I've had this trouble occasionally before, with books, where the characters are just such fools that it's impossible for me to feel about them the way the author means me to feel. "Tess of the D'urbervilles" comes to mind.
Anyway, does anyone else feel this way about this book, or am I just an ignorant Philistine who missed the whole point?

All you have to do is ask the Great Gatsby hismelf.... he is a regular poster in "The Chain Games".

agony, the whole point of Fitzgerald's classic is his critique of the rich of the 20's! Especially through Daisy and Tom! Gatsby's tragedy is that he's blind to Daisy's flaws, only really wants the Daisy he knew as a young man. But this shallow, overgrown spoiled brat deserves someone like Tom, a yellow punk who gets the grieving Wilson to kill Gatsby for the death of his wife (with whom Tom hd an affair), when it was Daisy who did it!

And Gatsby didn't exactly stalk Daisy, if you'll read more carefully. And Tom did spend a lot of time with Myrtle Wilson, only objecting to Gatsby when the latter made known his intention (that two-faced punk, Tom!). Yet Gatsby helped bring about his end by being quixotically blind to Daisy's unworthiness. She was perfectly happy with that jerk Tom. Though women got the vote in 1920, Women's Lib only really got started in the 60's. Daisy was created as a spoiled, shallow, limited young women by design, as part of Fitzgerald's critique of his times.

And especially remember what Fitzgerald thought of his title character, when narrator Nick Carraway, who starts out with contempt for Gatsby, winds up telling him "They're a rotten crowd (the other rich people on Long Island, Daisy and Tom, no doubt included!). You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."

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And Daisy's sin is precisely what? That, in the end, she chooses her husband and the father of her child over a man who has absolutely NO sense of who she really is? I suspect that Tom,. with all his faults as a husband, has a very clear idea of the real Daisy.
I'm not all that impressed with Nick either, by the way, For all his much - vaunted honesty, he seems to find it pretty easy to connive at the deceptions of all the other characters, "standing guard" for Daisy and Gatsby, keeping the secret of the hit-and-run. That seems to me to be Daisy's chief moral failing, by the way, failing to take any responsibility for the death of Mrs Wilson, but none of the other characters shows up very well there either. Gatsby talks a fine game, saying that he will take responsibility to shield Daisy, but in actual fact, he hides the car. NIck could have forestalled Gatsby's death, and Mr. Wilson's, by coming clean with what he knew, but it apparently never occured to him to do so.
I have no sympathy with Gatsby's obssesion with Daisy. That sort of thing is a kind of .....I don't know, "assault" is much too strong a word, but it gives sort of the flavour of what I mean. His feelings for her had nothing to do with the true human woman. Even if she had been a good woman, (which I admit she was not) there would be no way that she could live up to that idealized image. She made it clear to Gatsby just what she was when she began her affair with him, and if he was too much of a fool to realize it, too bad, but I can't feel sorry for him.
Anyway, my point is, I know what I was supposed to feel with this book, but I just didn't feel it. Maybe if I was a man, maybe if I was younger - this seems to me to be more a book about the strange and twisted hell that some people make of their marriages than about careless rich people.

Oh, and I think Fitzgerald was wrong, having no-one come to Gatsby's funeral. Out of that crowd, some of them would have gone for the thrill that a brush with notoriety and scandal would bring them. Not a very savory bunch.

This is one of my favorite books, and I consider myself a feminist, so let me throw in my two cents.

CAUTION: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD


Daisy's "sin" (if you will) is shown during the climax of the book, in which she allows Gatsby to take the blame for the hit-and-run accident which kills Myrtle. Near the end of the book Nick makes a remark about Tom and Daisy, that they go through life thoughtlessly destroying people.

I hesitate to say anything about this, but I must . These were the most empty characters I'd seen written of when I first read the book. But the symbolism in it was awesome to a much higher degree. And the book was honest, always. Fitzgerald was notorious for hanging out in rather vapid circles in the 20's. He probably knew all these people. And, even though I'm a male, I'm a staunch feminist as well and, clearly, Daisy was the villain in that piece. She was almost like a 'siren', luring the moon-eyed men to their deaths or destruction. And she didn't do Myrtle any favors, either. If you want to dig around in it she was probably the personification of the gluttony and selfishness in the 20s. Myrtle was the "crash" soon to come. I don't think the book is so much about the people in it but about the climate of the times. There's an awesome filming of the story that shows up occasionally on A&E. Not the Redford or Ladd versions from the theatres; this one totally nails it all. Catch it if you get the chance. Gatsby 722 is signing off now, but can't wait to read more of your thoughts.

Ok, I was sure that the audio book I was listening to was unabridged, but I'm going to go back to the library and look at it, because there must be something that I missed. I don't think much of Daisy, true, but I found her easily as sympathetic a character as Gatsby himself. In no way did he seem to me to be a "victim" of Daisy's or of Tom's.
So, anyway, if I was listening to an abridged version this might explain some of this disagreement. I'll go find out.

I didn't really like "The Great Gatsby" either. But I don't know if it was because it just wasn't my style or because I was younger when I read it. (freshman!) All I know is that there is something about "This Side Of Paradise" that makes me prefer it more.

I have trouble "liking" books when I despise all or most of the characters. But I did admire "Gatsby" for its concise power and the beauty of its language. And I understand that we are bieng shown a vast moral wasteland, so of course we oughtn't admire the characters, but I just don't generally enjoy the wasteland picture without some solid positive counterpart, or some glimmer of hope that it isn't inevitable. Also, it seems everyone's primary sin is that they are rich, which to this very day is still regarded as one of the worse possible sins in covetous America; so of course they must all be empty and shallow and callous, because, hey, they're rich! And we all know rich people have no redeeming qualities, and deserve nothing but misery and destruction.

Well, I find I have to make an apology to all the "Gatsby" fans out there. I had, after all, been listening to an abridgement, and so got a distorted view of the book (I couldn't understand how all these seemingly intelligent people were disagreeing with me! ). I'm working on getting my hands on a copy of the book, and will probably then be able to see what the rest of you saw in it. Sorry for wasting your time.

No problem Agony, abridged versions can cause all sorts of problems (We studied (14 Yrs old) an abridged version of the Nun's Priests Tale by Chaucer - Many years later I read the full text - Abridged, Bowdlerised, Censored, Sterilised, I can think of many words to describe the text we were given to read!
Anyway - (despite it still being subject to copyright ) http://www.online-literature.com/fitzgerald/greatgatsby/
which does have a summary chapter by chapter of the book.
I have found the text at http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/fitzgerald_the_great_gatsby.html