Reading Once And Again

I don’t really re-read books. I know one should, one changes with time so the second time you read you find new interesting things, you find more meaning to every word, you enjoy remembering how reading it for the first time was, etc. As I read Sonya Chung’s, The Great Gatsby Revisited, I found it extremely interesting how it was for her to read this book as an English teacher, after having read it in high school and college. The Great Gatsby definitely has some incredible sentences, which Chung shows and talks about: “Describing why a sentence is beautiful is a little like trying to describe what chocolate tastes like. For me, Fitzgerald’s sentences are somehow both profoundly weighted and soaring, confident in their matter-of-factness and indulgent in their romanticism” (Sonya Chung). The solemnity and truthfulness of the narrator stands out in this novel, helping Fitzgerald explain complex feelings and perceptions his characters are experimenting and making his novel verisimilar. I agree with Chung’s perception of Fitzgerald sentences, they truly stand out by themselves, showing a complete and believable truth of what is happening, giving the reader enough information of everything that is going on, without being repetitive or too out of order.

Chung appreciates Fitzgerald’s descriptions of the symbolic eyes and Daisy’s voice, something interesting that I hadn’t noticed in my first read of The Great Gatsby. “Both haunt me, they vibrate in my mind and ear well after reading; I hear Daisy and see those gigantic eyes much more vividly than I recall Gatsby himself. With these iterative descriptions, Fitzgerald impresses upon us the complex quality of Gatsby’s allure/repulsion to Daisy…” (Sonya Chung). I believe Fitzgerald’s novel is able to grasp the essence of the time-period with a strong narrator, one that has close relationships with all the characters, and strong descriptions of meaningful events, objects and places that make the story closer to the reader, even as if he was Nick, that individual who experiences the intrigue, violence and corruptness of this society. As with the sentences, Chung understands how significant the descriptions are to make The Great Gatsby stand out, make of itself a classic that both shows the society of this era of artistic and economical transformation.

Re-reading The Great Gatsby made Chung find new connections between Fitzgerald’s narrative and Hitchcock’s thematic and story development as seen when she states that the “yellow car/mistaken identify device, upon which the story’s climax and resolution hinge, feels almost Hitchcockian in its nod to the murder-mystery mixup. Who’s driving which car and why convincingly fuels (literally) Gatsby’s inevitable demise, Tom and Daisy’s flight, and Nick’s final revulsion towards the excesses of Eastern privilege” (Sonya Chung). Developing the climax of a story around an object, such as the yellow car, makes the story both reflect the materialism, economic change and superficiality of the era, helping the reader understand the context and connect the main ideas with one common object. I hadn’t reflected upon this similarity between Fitzgerald’s and Hitchcock’s style, both employing their artistic means of communicating a central idea through the significance of an object. Re-reading now proves being a much more interesting tool than it was before, a tool to help us remember and push us to discover.