Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past: Fitzgerald, Gatsby and WWI
11 comments
·March 25, 2025alabastervlog
Interesting look at some of the details of The Great Gatsby that connect to World War I, and Fitzgerald's own history with the war.
The museum that published this is quite good, though sadly a bit out of the way for many on this site (Kansas City). It's easily reachable with public transit if you're ever there and staying near downtown.
erehweb
The article mentions that Gatsby's stories are a little inconsistent, and that Nick would have realized this. Do critics generally think that Gatsby fully made them up and perhaps bought a Montenegro medal, or is he just being loose with details?
crims0n
I will always have a soft spot for Gatsby, it was my gateway drug into literature. I reread it every few years - the book is almost perfect, and short enough that you can get through it on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
jfengel
I'm afraid I just don't get Gatsby. The characters are all unpleasant people; I don't want to spend any time with them. None of the situations resonate with me. Its prose is a great evocation of a time period, but it's a time period I don't much care about.
I felt the same way about Jane Austen for a long time. It was a parody of manners, for a period I knew nothing about. I finally saw some really great filmed versions and I understood what the author was saying, and now I adore reading her work.
Maybe Gatsby will click for me some day. I reread it every decade or so, just to see if it happened. It hasn't yet.
cheeseomlit
Gatsby was a bit soured for me by having read it for the first time as an assignment in high school. Really sucks the fun out of literature when you're yanked out of it after every chapter to write a summary, or answer some dumb quiz questions about what color his car was in chapter 2
jasonjamerson
Gatsby is great, of course, but for me, "This Side of Paradise" is far better. Underappreciated.
thundergolfer
That's his debut novel and I think it shows. Experimental, and has some puzzling sections. Having read that, Gatsby, and Tender is the Night, I think the latter is his strongest writing but the plot isn't as grand and dramatic.
aadhavans
Agreed, one of my favorite pieces of literature. It's what got me into American historical fiction - I later ventured into Steinbeck and Mark Twain, both of whom are masters of the genre.
robocat
Love Twain and Steinbeck (most especially other works than Grapes of Wrath). Great Gatsby didn't work for me when I read it recently - just not my thing. I loved Catch 22 because I hadn't realized it was a comedy before I read it. It's tough because too often the best known past authors are unenjoyable to read.
null
Always a great opportunity to post my favorite passage of him about WWI- just hauntingly beautiful:
“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night