The Re-Birth Of A Book That Never Died

Maybe when we go back to the past, it has changed. Or maybe our future is meant to be going back to our past. I thought of writing this blog entry about the different points of view that Sonya Chung, but then I asked myself, why? Why would I want to re-write the same story, and fail, like Hunter S. Thompson tried with The Great Gatsby? Then, off course, I thought of the last line of Fitzgerald’s book, and how much it reflects what the Chung discusses in her blog entry: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald). Now is the moment I put into testing all what I’ve learned about close reading in the last three years. First of all, we can extract from this sentence that even though we look for a future, pursuit our destiny, destiny itself is back in our past. In fact, Nick Carraway goes back to his past at the end of the story, he leaves the East and goes back to his homeland at Minnesota.

But then, what does this have to do with Chung’s blog entry? Well, she talks about how “the works stays the same; it’s we who change” (Chung), and as well, refers to how each reading of a book is different. In the case of Nick Carraway, his homeland stays the same before and after his departure to New York, and even though he has the chance of “beating on” and continuing his life in the East, he goes back to the past, just in the same manner we go back to reading a book even though there are many more in our libraries. Destiny brings us back to the same book, once, twice, and every so often and each time we will find it different, but the book is, and will always be the same old story. But we, we are not the same person, in fact, we are older.

Without counting the beautiful sentences, the relevance of the film adaptation, or the importance of Fitzgerald’s descriptions, one thing that Chung notes about the book is its ability to be eternal: to survive the decades without getting old, without becoming ashes in oblivion. To point out this argument, she describes the book as being “it’s a story about everything and everyone else. “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all,” muses the narrator Nick Carraway at the end” (Chung). Based on this, the metaphor of The Great Gatsby becomes bigger than just the descriptions, the symbols, or the thematic. Instead, we can interpret this book as reflecting the reader itself through Nick’s experience. We are the West, those unimportant figures in the reading. Here, Fitzgerald highlights the reader as being the main character of the story. Because in the end, the story is simple, but those details he puts, and that metaphor that he creates with the book itself, is what makes the book immortal. By reading the book, maybe a couple of times more, we will see ourselves reflected on its pages.