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Quote by: CoffeeSaint All right, that's two of you now that consider The Great Gatsby to be vomit-inducing garbage; I won't say it's my favorite book, but I didn't think it was that bad. Why do you hate it so much? Chaossaber, you said it seems to be saying, "Woe is us. We're rich and we're not happy with our lives." What's wrong with that as a message? Is sorrow or suffering the province of the lower classes? Does money solve enough problems that the only things left for rich people are pathetic in comparison?
The rich people in the book are miserable, but not because of their wealth. Daisy and Tom have crappy lives because they're shallow and arrogant, Jordan Baker is dishonest, and Gatsby is misguided in thinking he can recapture his idealized past, which never actually existed as he remembers it -- and is gone, in any case. What's wrong with those as morals?
Or does even the thought of discussing this make you dry heave? |
Gatsby and co. were products of the "jazz age", which was a largely vaccuous era. It was not wealth but hedonism that drove the novel.