The Great Gatsby: A Brief Retelling

 F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby starts off as one of the most boring books I've ever read in my life. What seemed like a promising title was filled with around five chapters of pure nothingness. In fact, the book only begins to get good once Daisy is back together with Gatsby.

To begin, the book recounts a summer in the 1920s when Nick Carraway's neighbor, Gatsby, threw lavish parties and pined for the affection of Daisy Buchanan. This is all that goes on for pages and pages; Gatsby throws a part hoping to lure Daisy in, but alas this never happens. This makes for a very boring first couple of chapters.

The story dramatically picks up pace when Daisy and Gatsby decide to resume their love affair from the past despite Daisy being happily married. For one, this seems totally uncharacteristic with Daisy's character as presented thus far. True, she does seem like a fun loving woman but nowhere in the text does it hint that she'd be willing to throw her marriage away like her husband has. She doesn't seem like the type to get revenge for such trivial things.

What started off as a snooze fest morphs into an action packed story by the end. Not only is there a secret love affair, well two secret love affairs, but there is also a murder that goes unsolved until Gatsby admits that Daisy accidentally killed Myrtle. This prompts the local men to begin a manhunt to find her murderer without knowing that who they are looking for is no man at all, but rather a very popular woman from West Egg. A misunderstanding over who was driving the car that ran over and killed Myrtle leads to Myrtle’s husband killing both Gatsby and himself in a murder-suicide in Gatsby’s very own backyard. 

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This is the most important quote in relevance to the story as a whole. What happens in the entire book is summed up by this one small quote; people can never truly be happy with what they have and thus they must create trouble to try to get what they desire without realizing that it is a cycle. They are endlessly reliving the past because of a failure to move on and let go.