"Dan McCall, a professor emeritus at Cornell University, taught the book for 40 years. He marvels at the hold Gatsby still has on students. On the one hand, he said, with its hypnotic prose, its layers of longing for money, status, reinvention and love, it’s still channeling the American experience. “It’s not an antique to them, it’s never gone out of style the way some books I teach.” On the other hand, he said, Gatsby’s evocation of the American dream has an innocence and passion that are impossibly distant, like astral material from a lost galaxy. “Gatsby’s dream, the way he’s so devoted to it, that’s not something you find much in this economy, at this time. I think it’s breathtaking for kids in college. It’s an America they haven’t heard about from their parents.” " - PETER APPLEBOME
"Maybe someone will write today’s “Gatsby.” Or maybe it would just be an epic tweet: “Yo, Gatz. Blue lawn, green light, so close, but too far. Ahh, Daisy. We beat on, boats vs. the current, borne back, lol, into the past.”
I think that Peter Applebome's comment on how students connect to The Great Gatsby is really true. First off, it is a short novel that many of us had read before coming to Harrington's class. Though one of my peers, Elise, had never read it before though and I remember distinctly her reading it in one of our other classes. It drew her in so intensely that she could not put it down! Personally, I had read the novel in high school and was astounded at the beautiful sentence structure all over again. Even something as simple as in Chapter 7 as a boat moving along the water, Fitzgerald is able to capture intensity, movement, and beauty in with his words. "On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea...Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky." Fitzgerald pulls us in with his words. They meld together so smoothly that before I realized I was already half way through the book. More over, Fitzgerald has astounding characters that represent ridiculous aspects of society. We see immense wealth, moral decay, death, adultery. These are the topics that get audiences engaged and that is why this book functions so well in the classroom. Is Fizgerald representing the American Dream? Is Gatsby corrupt?
Applebome goes further in the NY Times article to comment on who Jay would be in the 21st century. Would he be a Bernie Madoff or a Mark Zuckerburg? I think that this article captures a great deal in the side comments. The commentary was brought up though because a huge mansion in Great Neck is being sold and it is said to be the inspiration for The Great Gatsby. Does it matter if these mansions disappear? Apparently over 500 of these mansions have already been knocked down.
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