Personal Review

Of all of the books I have been forced to read throughout my high school years, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is my favorite. It is not the overall plot that makes this novel exciting, but the way Fitzgerald uses diction, syntax, and rhetorical strategies throughout the entire story, and on top of all that his work is very easily relatable to anyone who has or ever will be in high school. Although I am only a junior in high school, I feel as if I have heard it all by now, the drama, the rumors, the lies. None of it is new to me anymore and by reading this novel I have observed that it is best to play the role of Nick Carraway and stay on the sidelines so to speak, and let all of the people who are willing, destroy their lives with meaningless issues that will get you nowhere in life. Another lesson that can be extracted from this book is the idea that looking back on the past and wishing hopelessly to relive past experiences can only force you back into it. Which is a terrible thing to do because how is it possible to progress forward and live a good and fulfilling life if you are always trying to go backwards? Gatsby is a prime example of that because him trying to win Daisy back ultimately results in his death. Instead of moving on with his life, he dedicates five years to trying to revive a past relationship as it once was before the war. The ending of the novel (though predictable because someone always manages to get killed in one of these classics) seems fitting to me. Not because Gatsby deserves to die, which I do not believe he does, but because everything comes with a price, and the five years of his life dedicated to winning Daisy back are all wasted in the end. It is true that we are all going to die sooner or later, so why not live life in the moment and look forward instead of concentrating on what could have been.