The Great Gatsby Review 2026: Timeless American Dream Critique
- David Lapadat
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
I reread The Great Gatsby last month, almost exactly a century after its 1925 publication.
The experience felt strangely timely, as if Fitzgerald had somehow glimpsed our current obsessions with wealth displays, curated personas, and the quiet desperation behind filtered lives.
Yet the irony stings...
Fitzgerald died in 1940 at age forty-four, convinced the novel had flopped.
It sold fewer than 20,000 copies in his lifetime, and he carried that disappointment to the grave.
Only later—revived by wartime paperbacks and academic attention—did it become the “Great American Novel” contender we know today.
I respect its precision and cultural weight, however it’s never been my favorite Fitzgerald.
I give it a solid 3.5 out of 5 stars. (Stick around to find out why).
The prose dazzles, the themes cut deep, but something in its emotional temperature leaves me admiring more than moved.
Still, its cult status makes perfect sense: few books diagnose the hollow core of aspiration with such surgical clarity.
The Plot in Broad Strokes (No Major Spoilers)
Nick Carraway, a Midwestern bond salesman, rents a modest house on Long Island in 1922.
Next door looms the mansion of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire famous for lavish parties that draw New York’s glittering crowd.
Across the bay live Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan and her brutish husband Tom.
What unfolds is less a conventional plot than a slow collision of illusions—past romances, social climbing, inherited privilege—all narrated by Nick with a mixture of fascination and moral unease.
Short sentences work best here.
The story moves like a fever dream. One moment you’re inside a drunken party roaring with jazz; the next, you’re staring at a quiet valley of ashes under the watchful eyes of a faded billboard.
Fitzgerald builds tension not through action but through withheld truths.
(We’ll return to how those omissions shape everything.)
Jay Gatsby: The Invention of a Man
Gatsby stands as one of literature’s most compelling self-creations.
He reinvents himself from humble origins, amassing wealth through shadowy means, all to recapture a lost love from five years earlier.
His tragedy isn’t mere unrequited longing; it’s the belief that money can turn back time, that enough cash and spectacle can restore a moment that never truly existed as he remembers it.
Reading him now, I think of Lacan’s mirror stage stretched into adulthood: Gatsby constructs an ideal image of himself and desperately wants the world—especially Daisy—to confirm it.
When reality intrudes, the reflection cracks.
Fitzgerald refuses to make him pathetic.
There’s dignity in Gatsby’s refusal to surrender the dream, even as it devours him.
He’s part Pygmalion, part Sisyphus—forever rolling his myth uphill, convinced the next party, the next gesture, will finally make it stick.
Nick Carraway: The Unreliable Midwestern Moralist
Nick claims to reserve judgment, but his narrative drips with quiet disdain for nearly everyone.
He’s drawn to Gatsby’s “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” but repelled by Tom and Daisy’s careless privilege.
Is Nick truly honest, or does he flatter himself as the only decent soul in a corrupt world?
This question lingers throughout.
Fitzgerald uses Nick’s voice—elegant, reflective, occasionally sentimental—to create distance.
We see events through a lens that wants to believe in romantic possibility (remember those withheld truths?) while simultaneously documenting its collapse.
In a way, Nick prefigures the postmodern narrator: aware of his own framing, yet unable to escape it.
He’s closer to Humbert Humbert’s self-justification than to the omniscient gods of Victorian fiction.
The Buchanans and the Rot Beneath Privilege
Tom and Daisy Buchanan embody inherited wealth’s moral vacancy.
Tom is all physical certainty—polo player, Yale bully, casual racist—while Daisy’s voice, famously “full of money,” floats like champagne bubbles: beautiful, empty, gone in an instant.
Fitzgerald’s portrait of old money feels merciless yet never cartoonish.
The Buchanans don’t scheme like villains; they simply drift, smashing things and people, then retreating into their vast carelessness.
It’s a quieter kind of cruelty than overt malice.
Reading them today, the parallels to certain tech dynasties or political families feel uncomfortably direct.
The same insulated confidence that nothing will truly touch them.
Symbolism That Actually Works
The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.
The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg brooding over the valley of ashes.
The parties that leave guests strangely unsatisfied.
These images have been analyzed to death, and they sill retain power because Fitzgerald embeds them naturally.
The green light isn’t announced as a Symbol of the American Dream; it simply recurs, a small beacon Gatsby stretches toward across the water.
The Eckleburg billboard—faded advertisement for an oculist—functions almost like a secular God, witnessing moral decay without intervening.
It reminds me of Camus’ indifferent universe in The Stranger, though Fitzgerald’s tone is more elegiac than absurd.
Fitzgerald’s Prose: Economy and Music
Fitzgerald writes with a poet’s ear and a surgeon’s knife.
Sentences glide, then cut.
Consider:
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
Or the devastating simplicity of the final line (no spoilers): it lands like a verdict delivered after a long trial.
His style owes something to Conrad and Keats, filtered through the rhythms of jazz.
Reading aloud, you hear the syncopation.
Yet—and here’s part of my reservation—the lyricism sometimes feels too polished.
Every observation arrives perfectly shaped, leaving little room for messiness.
Compare it to Hemingway’s stripped spareness (the two were friends and rivals), and Fitzgerald can feel almost decorative by contrast.
Why 3.5 Stars? A Personal Confession
Don’t misunderstand, The Great Gatsby is masterful.
Its diagnosis of how capitalism sells us a future that recedes forever ahead remains painfully accurate.
The novel understands that the American Dream isn’t just unattainable for most—it’s structurally designed to keep us chasing.
Emotionally, it holds me at arm’s length.
Gatsby’s grandeur fascinates, but his inner life stays half-shadowed.
Daisy’s fragility charms, then frustrates.
Even Nick’s final disillusion feels more intellectual than visceral.
I respond more strongly to books that risk ugliness—Bolaño’s sprawling despair in 2666, or the raw loneliness in Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro.
Gatsby’s tragedy is exquisite, but exquisitely controlled.
(And perhaps that control is the point: Fitzgerald showing us a world where even suffering must be aesthetically pleasing.)
The Novel’s Afterlife and Cultural Shadow
Few books have infiltrated culture so thoroughly.
Luhrmann’s 2013 film, the Leonardo DiCaprio version, the endless “old sport” memes, the Gatsby-themed parties that miss the irony entirely.
However, the text itself resists easy consumption. It’s short—under 50,000 words—yet dense with implication. Every rereading reveals new layers.
Fitzgerald captured something essential about the American psyche: our belief that identity can be purchased, that the past can be revised with sufficient will and cash.
In an era of NFTs, influencer branding, and inherited billionaire politicians, the book feels less like history than prophecy.
Final Thoughts
The Great Gatsby earns its classic status not because it flatters us, but because it exposes the transaction at the heart of the dream: we trade authenticity for the appearance of arrival, then wonder why we feel hollow.
I’ll return to it again, I’m sure.
Not because it’s my desert-island book, but because it keeps diagnosing the particular sickness of wanting too beautifully.
Rating: 3.5 / 5 stars
Related Articles on Classic Literature:
Comments