Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 182 posts

Re: The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

#161

Post by noname123 »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #160
noname123 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mi Mexicanito, sinceramente de este chinito, "On the Road" is imho about all about these gringo's chase for cultural/spiritual accumulation - just with beatnik fashion/prose than with a briefcase. >Teresa (who is from Mexico/o la conquista sexual temporal de nuestro supuesto héroe en "busca de la verdad") didn’t want Sal to leave, but he told her that he had to. He had sex with Teresa in the barn his last night in th…

/ My reading of On the Road is Jack Kerouac’s ultimate realization that their restless wandering is really a narcissistic chase—sex, jazz, drugs—to fill an inner void. I don’t think the novel supports “narcissism” as a central answer that explains everything. The book is much more about restless hunger for experience and living in the moment. And jazz in particular isn’t framed as a symptom of emptiness; it functions…

Thank you for your response. My last word is one of my favorite film is "Y tu mamá También" where my favorite character de la película es Mexico, life is like foam, so give yourself away like the sea. Puedes vivir el momento, pero tu posición social es para siempre. Hope you have a great day/year.

Re: The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

#163

Post by [deleted] »

yanhangyhy wrote: post #67

Personally, aside from Russian literature, I now prefer American literature, which I think is underestimated in China. I really like that film adaptation, but what the film expresses is something else, not the same as the novel’s core theme. My own understanding is that American literature has at least three themes that are very distinctive and different from Europe(or other countries). One is the depiction of desola…

[deleted]

Re: The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

#164

Post by thijson »

takoid wrote: post #21

I always enjoyed D’Angelo Barksdale’s interpretation from The Wire: > D’Angelo: "He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it—all that shit matters. Like at the end of the book, you know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right? You can say you’re somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you real…

The show itself was pretty good too.

Re: The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

#165

Post by FreakLegion »

seanhunter wrote: post #84

I am in (perhaps) a tiny minority in that I love American literature but just don’t get what the fuss is about The Great Gatsby. I just don’t think it’s that good a novel. Off the top of my head I could come up with a list of at least 10 American novels that I have read that I think are significantly superior. In no order here goes 1. Blood meridian 2. The Bell Jar 3. Of Mice and Men 4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s go…

Fitzgerald's style is a pretty linear development out of early Joyce, say Dubliners and the first episodes of Ulysses. It compares to Woolf and McCarthy just fine.

Your list reminds me of a joke from Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise:

  So
  Walter Arensberg,
  Alfred Kreymborg,
  Carl Sandburg,
  Louis Untermeyer,
  Eunice Tietjens,
  Clara Shanafelt,
  James Oppenheim,
  Maxwell Bodenheim,
  Richard Glaenzer,
  Scharmel Iris,
  Conrad Aiken,
  I place your names here
  So that you may live
  If only as names,
  Sinuous, mauve-colored names,
  In the Juvenalia
  Of my collected editions.

Re: The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

#166

Post by aebtebeten »

bell-cot wrote: post #121
aebtebeten wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's intentional. Going back and rereading both 1984 and Brave New World as an adult made me realize how awful my english teachers' interpretations ("fantastic dystopias" instead of "mirrors of then-current society") had been. Give them to kids who don't have the life experience to interpret them for themselves, and you can make people believe they know what Orwell and Huxley were writing about...

> Going back an rereading ... made me realize how awful my english teachers' interpretations ... Consider that a final lesson. Both about how much you've changed since high school, and about the career-ending downside to teaching kids that current society already is pretty damn dystopian.

> career-ending downside

Yeah, even if it provides minimal didactic value I guess K-12 is at least a twelve year apprenticeship in how to tolerate the sort of hierarchical environments in which both the inmates and their keepers would much rather be doing just about anything else?

Re: The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

#167

Post by wink »

sometimes_all wrote: post #72

While I'm not an American, I read a bit of American literature, and sometimes I feel that many American children/teenagers are exposed to the classics slightly early, before they can accurately pick up nuances, understand the social structure of the setting, and are able to grasp the different strengths and foibles of human beings, both real and fictional. This tends to make them either misunderstand the text, read i…

I found my German curriculum to be a lot worse at this. Basically zero books I read in German classes that I liked, compared to most of the "classics" in English lessons I all found ok to good. Maybe because some were more accessible or at least relatable or closer to my interests, but we're talking about educating teenagers here. (E.g. Animal Farm, 1984, Poe, Shakespeare (quite some overlap to what people read in their native English)) vs ... I don't even know which of the ones we read are known to an international audience...

Re: The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

#168

Post by reassess_blind »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #120
seanhunter wrote: post #84

I am in (perhaps) a tiny minority in that I love American literature but just don’t get what the fuss is about The Great Gatsby. I just don’t think it’s that good a novel. Off the top of my head I could come up with a list of at least 10 American novels that I have read that I think are significantly superior. In no order here goes 1. Blood meridian 2. The Bell Jar 3. Of Mice and Men 4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s go…

I never really understood Infinite Jest, and I've tried to read it several times over the past couple of decades. I don't really get on with the "wacky wacky wacky" nonsense humour, and the constant sesquipedalian polysyllablism in every incongruent sentence makes it read like it was written by a smartarse 14-year-old who has just found they can look up long words in a thesaurus and thinks it makes them sound clever.…

“sesquipedalian polysyllablism”. One might have the same critiques about your word choice.

Re: The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

#169

Post by Izkata »

yanhangyhy wrote: post #90
noname123 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Chinese-American, in my humble opinion the Great Gatsby is the 1920's version of "On the Road", "American Psycho" and "Liar's Poker". In another words, it is about the American spirit to chase money/success/glamour in spite of the protagonist's preconceived understanding that doing so would end up ultimately futile and empty. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgasmic future that year by year recedes befo…

I recently read an American novel that gave me a deeper insight into what you were saying. I don’t know its English title, but roughly translating the Chinese title back, it’s California Gold. It’s about the son of a miner who dreams of striking it rich; step by step he becomes a wealthy man in California. The story has some moral sense, too. It was probably a very popular novel in the U.S. at one point. But I felt t…

> I don’t know its English title, but roughly translating the Chinese title back, it’s California Gold. It’s about the son of a miner who dreams of striking it rich; step by step he becomes a wealthy man in California. The story has some moral sense, too. It was probably a very popular novel in the U.S. at one point.

Is it this? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71775.California_Gold

Based on the author's name being more prominent than the book's title, from what I picked up while working at a library I don't think there was anything special about this book. He probably wrote a lot and had a reliable set of readers who looked for his name, akin to Nora Roberts or a few others I can half-remember.

It's also included but not called out at all on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jakes

Re: The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)

#170

Post by Izkata »

sometimes_all wrote: post #72

While I'm not an American, I read a bit of American literature, and sometimes I feel that many American children/teenagers are exposed to the classics slightly early, before they can accurately pick up nuances, understand the social structure of the setting, and are able to grasp the different strengths and foibles of human beings, both real and fictional. This tends to make them either misunderstand the text, read i…

Some of them are also just badly written, like The Scarlet Letter - the impression that stuck with me was it took way too long to get to the point, so much so that the second half of the book contained needed context for the first half to have any meaning at all.

And I was one of the few who got it when we read it. I don't think anyone I knew realized the movie Easy A shared any themes with that book, but it was just so much better done they understood the relevant themes from it.

Post reply on HN