Sunday, March 14, 2010

Well we finally finished The Great Gatsby, and, despite all of my criticism of it, I actually fairly enjoyed. The enjoyment is due to two different reasons: It has character exposition in the middle of the story (which is something that I really enjoy in any work of entertainment) and also, and this is unfortunately the main reason, we are reading this book while reading As I Lay Dying, which is something that I personally detest (what was I suppose to learn from this book?).
Anyhow the one thing that I really liked about The Great Gatsby is that it has character exposition in the middle of the novel. This is when a character’s past is revealed slowly to the reader so that the reader gets a deeper understanding for a certain character. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is one of those characters. There is a whole mysterious shroud over him and throughout the story, Fitzgerald slowly unravel that shroud. The reason that I like these kinds of exposition I is that it preserves something for the reader to look forward to. This I think could even fill in for some plot failures. This also just makes the story and its characters more interesting. These expositions usually reveal surprising facts about characters that I really enjoy. It just has that feeling of awe as you get to know the characters more. This method of exposition allows characterization itself to tell a story (and it is always awesome to find out that the character is a lot more than you give him/ her credit for).
Another thing I want to talk about is the horribleness of As I Lay Dying, which contributed a lot to my liking of The Great Gatsby. There are just so much wrong with this novel. It is incoherent. Though there might be a plot line, but all of the characters’ views are making the plot line very hard to follow. Furthermore, this whole varying truth that is employed is very confusing to the point that the reader does not know what do believe. Another big problem is that Falkner is trying too hard to imitate thought. There is a reason why people say “you won’t understand” or “it is only funny to me”. That’s because thought should not be understood by anyone but you. This broken language makes it very hard to comprehend. Also the substance is just ridicules. It is almost impossible to relate yourself to the story because the story is not written in a realist form. Though fairy tales are sometimes enjoyable, stories that sets a realist tone but isn’t consistent with it is just dumb. There is also just weird stuff that Falkner does that doesn’t make sense and makes the story really hard to follow. Things like putting spaces in the middle of the page or drawing a coffin in the middle of the page are, although thought-provoking, ambiguous.

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