Lesson #10

There was something about The Great Gatsby that made me feel inherently nauseous from reading it. The apparent infidelity and the idea of love was completely shaken, leaving the ending with the message that the love the characters expressed for each other in this book was normal, healthy and actually real love. I personally don't think I could disagree more.

"I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove."

The fact of the matter is that this quote shows the ignorance and immaturity of ideals from the characters in this book. First of all the idea that you can walk into someone else's life without changing anything is completely inaccurate. This was disproved multiple times throughout the novel. You can essentially only enter someone's life if you make an impact on it. If you meet someone, then the change you make may only be slight, but I promise you there is one. This is especially true when people seem to think that they can have a really casual relationship with little commitment, (which was really the only type of relationship seen in The Great Gatsby) and nobody will get hurt in the end. I want to emphasize the fact that you can not enter anybody's life emotionally and expect there to be no strings attached. We as human beings want to form connections, and connections come with all of the good and the bad. The only reason Nick said that he "imagined" this is because it cannot be real. Yet so many people not only in this book, but in our lives try to make this fabricated concept a reality. It's like people are so completely absorbed in what they want that they can't for even a second imagine hurting the other person. We are all people who have pasts, and those pasts come with pain, loss, love, fears, desires, and HUMAN EMOTIONS. If you haven't figured it out yet, these emotions are physically inescapable. Coming into relationships with the idea that you can be indifferent to who the other person is, is absurd. Everybody's relationship in this book was messy, and that is where I would like to address the problem; if you feel anything for another person, whether it be friendship or hate, or any kind of love, you cannot expect there to be no strings attached. If you make even the slightest impact on that person then you have entered into their lives. People are complicated, and I am sure that will never change. We feel things like love and hate, and with that comes a certain responsibility that I feel The Great Gatsby chose to ignore. Fitzgerald tried to scrape by with the deepest concept of love being obsession. The simple fact of the matter is that is not love, and I hope dearly that people know that. If Gatsby had really loved Daisy he would have wanted what was best for her, but all Gatsby wanted was what was best for himself. The reason I cannot be in support of this book is because I think they chose to glorify things like infidelity and the representation of lust as love. It is sad to say that things like this aren't viewed as wrong or incorrect. I hope this idea of human relationships is one that started and ended with this book. Because people are not surface level.

Lesson #10: Entering someone's life always makes an impact.