The Great Gatsby…
As the band plays Jazz and the lights, they flash and the dancers dance and the drinks go round once more, as a thousand times they have already, and shatter-drops of tipsy laughter sparkle on the floor, young Carraway watches the world’s most extravagant shadow stare with a longing at a light on the a other side of a too-far pond.
Sometimes only a run-on can express, exactly, or maybe, begin to express. F. Scott Fitzgerald deftly placed words in the way one might imagine that a jazz bands plays- catching up motion, emotion, excitement in a sentence or two, and honest-to-goodness love in a page. To bring characters to life is something every author dreams of- and that’s usually it. Gatsby’s smile, and uncomfortability, was undeniably alive.
Gatsby is a story about humans being human, from the perspective of a life-tossed wordsmith. At sea in the bright lights of the 1920’s with a cousin, her husband, and a madman in a suit, Nick Carraway recalls the life that was lived between betrayals. Wild partying, to be followed by flying, a downtown ride in the summer sun, the gaze of two ever-watching eyes, and a tragic, pointless loss.
Read the Great Gatsby, not for moral uplifting, but for the opportunity to see life come alive on a page like it really hasn’t before. Like a movie, actually, without the whirring of a projector in the back. Delve into another period, that is more colorfully our own, and meet a narrator who has, quite simply, brought his characters to life.
The Embarrassed Zebra 