The Great Gatsby - What Am I Missing?

What are you missing? Well, the "r," for one thing. Oh, there it is.

  My guess is that, even though the book was a flop when it was first released, it became a major classic as a result of being a staple of high school lit classes for decades, because--

    1. It's fairly short. Any high school American Lit teacher who attempts to assign Moby Dick to his short-attention-span students is going to have 
a full-scale mutiny on his hands once the kids start whining about how they can't possibly slog through hundreds of pages on the processing of whale sperm.
Their parents, who sometimes wind up doing the homework assignments for their kids, don't want to read it either. But Gatsby is less than 200 pages long, so that makes it popular.

    2. It's full of obvious symbolism and allegory and all those other devices that lit teachers and students alike love, making it easy for the kids to concoct a quick essay about the green light at the end of the dock bit or some such thing, which the teachers can easily grade in their sleep, having seen thousands of variations on the same theme before.

   3. Because something has to be designated as the "Great American Novel." And The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a better contender for the title
(and it's more entertaining, too) has that word in it, so it's often banned from high-school reading lists. 

  4. Cliff notes, reading guides, and several movie versions have made this a popular choice for those who prefer to skim through the book as well.

 The best thing about the book, IMO, was when the late comedian/performance artist Andy Kaufman read the book, cover to cover, to an audience expecting a comedy performance. After he read the first few pages, they waited and waited for him to stop and get on with the rest of the show, but he never did. The show ended several hours later, when he finally came to the end of the novel. That Andy, what a kidder.


  

I like it... but then I also quite enjoyed Battlefield Earth so what do I know?

I wouldn't go as far as calling it "crap", but I share your puzzlement over its high position in the ranking of great works of American literature.

I get irritated whenever I run across a thread where someone pronounces a classic film or book to be "crap" and demands that its status be explained to him/her. If you really wanted to know why The Great Gatsby is held in high regard you could easily find out simply by reading its Wikipedia article. That would get you better insight than from some random people who happen to click on your thread. How does a half-dozen replies saying, "I didn't like it either," answer your question. Was your real purpose simply to appear to be iconoclastic? To say, "Look at what a rebel I am!" If you really wanted a discussion of the book you wouldn't have posted "crap" and "what the fuck" as if Gatsby had actually made you angry. Using a little more maturity might have actually got your question answered.

Nobody said anything close to those quotes. In the first place, as I originally said, butthurt - as you have over the torture you had to endure in the pages of Gatsby - is an inappropriate response. I never said I like Gatsby, either. I can't say I did, but neither did I DISLIKE it. It didn't move me or shake me but I understood what the author was trying to do and how it could be perceived by others. It doesn't take an empath to do that. You should have figured it out for yourself. As for the defensive reaction to the horror, the horror, of thinking that you are being forced into accepting a pre-existing list of classics, that is just paranoid nonsense. I will say, however, that even if you don't like so-called classics, at least you should have some respect just for its staying power and for the reason of that staying power. It should mean something to you that several generations of readers have appreciated the book and that it is pretty egotistical of you to come along at this point to inform everyone that it is crap. And "retarded"? Really? Anyone using such a junior high school hallway insult is the one who lacks maturity.

Because it's a perfectly written, succinct allegory about the failure of the American dream, written at a time just before the great depression. Anyway thats my answer to your question.

Can I just say Painbow and Mikef6, as far as internet arguments go, yours is pretty run of the mill, but the fact that your avatars are Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart, make it awesome!!! The movie world has been waiting decades for this duel!!!