[HN Gopher] Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past: Fitzgerald, Ga...
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Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past: Fitzgerald, Gatsby and WWI
Author : gmays
Score : 37 points
Date : 2025-03-25 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theworldwar.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theworldwar.org)
| crims0n wrote:
| 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.
| aadhavans wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Gatsby is great, of course, but for me, "This Side of Paradise"
| is far better. Underappreciated.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| shadowtree wrote:
| 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 fiancee, and little cafes
| 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
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