1998Question3

F. Scott Fitgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, is a work which I truly can value as "uncivilized free and wild thinking." Written in a time when the United States was just beginning to adopt its new modernism, this book was very uncivilized for the 1920s. In it were introduced a numver of ideas and social behaviors that were not thought proper. Far from boring, The Great Gatsby is a very moving piece with far-reaching thoughts which the book is centralized around.
Compared to many of todays novels, which are scattered throughout book stores, Fitzgerald's are nothing, merely stories of men who have fallen in love with women they can never have. The same has been told a thousand times and each in a different light, a poor man, Gatsby, falling in love with a rich girl, Rose, to whom he can never wed due to his class. Mixed through the plot are a series of love triangles and affairs, each interwiavably obvious to each of the oblivius characters obsessed with their own love. When you look at The Great Gatsby that is all you see, at first. Once the reader really delves down into the book the mood begins to change. An outsider narrates the piece of a military man who has come back from making his fortune in an effort to woo the girl of his dreams who has married another. Each of the characters are protrayed as the upper class, flaunting their money in every way but also are given to the style of the twenties. Pink suits are worn and yellow cars driven. When put into context it becomes apparent that in fact this is not the conventional love tragedy but actually a writers attemp to breech the gap between the traditions of the early twenties and the openness of the thirties. To people of the time the book would be rather shocking with the affairs, secret engagements, parties, and murder. This is not the boring story told by many, but a new and intriguing work which appealed to the rebellious side of people in a very strict and wholesome society.
The entire book is centered on Fitzgerald's desire to make his novel different and to test the limits which were no longer placed before him. Perhaps the common plot was used only to shw that the old could be changed into something new and different, a piece altogether intriguing. Instead o making Gatsby a peasant and Rose a princess, a pair whose marriage would be impossible, Fitzgerald made them an army man and stuck up girl with a wealthy father. By putting those characters into the society of his time the author was leaving the boringness which had preceeded him and entered a world of imagination and mystery, a land uncivilized and untamed. Through his many subtle changes Fitzgerald was able to convert the common plot into a delightful work of art wich draws on the readers attraction for something different.
The Great Gatsby is a perfect example of something which leaves the tameness of the common stories for wild and untamed thinking. Although he used the conventional literary techniques in writing it, Fitzgerald created a piece which, for its time, was very unconventional. By expanding his thinking he was able to bridge the strict set of codes set up in the past to open a boundless future for writers. Although today his writing may at first appear rather dull, after reading a bit more it becomes apparent that there is more than just a literal meaning to the piece and that the thinking was quite different and revolutionary for its time, "uncivilized free and wild thinking."