Seems To Be

I have to confess that I really didn’t see the point of The Great Gatsby while reading it. I thought it was boring and I didn’t understand the story very well and much less why I was assigned to read it. I found myself distracted and “half asleep” like Sonya Chung did when she was 13 years old and read the novel for the first time. And when I surprised myself in that state I would re read the page annoyed but did find some sense to the sentences I was skimming through the page. I am sure I never understood it because after reading this blog entry by Chung and after the little discussions we have had in class, it all makes sense now. Something similar happened to me last summer while reading Dante’s Inferno, but that time I was very close to committing suicide because I read a whole book and had not understood a verse of it (not a paragraph because I now know it was a poem). When I got to class and we took time discussing it, it was like when somebody explains to you a joke that everybody laughed out but you didn’t because you didn’t get it. I laughed along.

The Great Gatsby appears then to be magnificent. If I remember right, there were some things that I did find interesting. Like the scene when Daisy, Tom, Gatsby, Nick and Jordan are at a suite in the Plaza Hotel and they are discussing many different things that seem to have nothing to do with the other and the whole discussion and things that are happening confuse the reader, just as the characters are confused, and this happens to be the beginning of the climax of the novel when Gatsby argues, violently, with Tom over Daisy’s love. And then the yellow car kills Myrtle. “The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her think dark blood with the dust.” (pg. 137) Any more description? They are indeed “luminous sentences” as Sonya Chung points out. What a shame that I missed them. No kidding, I would like to reread The Great Gastby some day, not soon, but some day.