The Great Gatsby Blog: Personal Review
Scott Fitzgerald informed, entertained, perplexed and shocked me all within his novel, “The Great Gatsby”. I was extremely pleased throughout the reading of this novel and pleasantly flustered due to the amount of figurative language and deep thought.
I felt that the author filled every page with meaning rather than empty pages that led up to a meaningful page. His skillful inclusion of rhetorical strategies, foreshadowing, and in my opinion, brilliant symbols helped him achieve that. Even though the story was rather short, the content did not disappoint. As far as plot goes, I was hesitant towards my liking of it. I found myself often waiting for the plot to go somewhere, but only in the beginning. I do like character development, and though it is essential to a story like this, there was too much. It distracted from the continuation of the story. On the other hand, the character development did lend a quality of authenticity in that I really grasped the spirit of the 1920’s. Characterized by the narrators occasional rambling, the story also took off on a somewhat frantic path. This chaos was mainly due to the dense content of the book. Perhaps I felt this way because I was constantly annotating the book and picking it apart. If I had read the book for pure enjoyment and with no goal of improving my own writing, the author’s genius would have been left unappreciated. So, even if it did feel frantic at times, I found myself satisfied with the new content on each page. In some sorts, the novel had a puzzling element because of all the hidden symbols and foreshadowing. As a student, I’ve been told that reading will change my perspective of the world and increase my level of comprehensibility. The puzzling nature of the story was enjoyable to me because I truly saw and became mesmerized by my mind in action. Though it seems odd, I feel as if I know the author a little bit, too. It’s almost as if the puzzles devices he used are hidden within the passages, but once revealed, show a tremendous amount of personality. Also, the author’s choice to narrate the story through the eyes of Nick Carraway appealed to me. He told a different story than what we are used to hearing from the “prosperous” era. Furthermore, I complained earlier that the plot took awhile to get going. This wasn’t the case for the ending. I was very pleased and shocked by the turn of events and the exciting events that took place. So, overall, I enjoyed “The Great Gatsby”. There were many challenging, yet pleasing elements to the story and I feel as if Fitzgerald taught me a great deal about writing.