I decided to read—and eventually buy—The Great Gatsby after Haruki Murakami recommended it in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Murakami wrote:
“The Great Gatsby is a truly extraordinary novel. I never tire of its story, no matter how many times I read it. It is a work of literature that enriches you each time you open it. Every rereading reveals something new, something fresh.”
At first, the story felt painfully slow. I even put the book down for almost two weeks—despite its slim length of just over a hundred pages. Jazz Age America, seen through Nick Carraway’s eyes, appeared hollow to me: a world filled with etiquette, polite conversations, and quiet arrogance.
Everything shifted the moment Nick met Jay Gatsby.
Something clicked. From that point on, I could no longer stop turning the pages. Gatsby stood apart from the people of East Egg and West Egg—mysterious, hopeful, and perhaps the only character who possessed a sincere emotional core in such a carefully constructed world.
Gatsby did not enjoy his parties. Those lavish nights were never meant for the crowds. They were offered to one person alone: Daisy.
Daisy as he preserved her in his mind. Daisy as the reason he gathered wealth, built a life, and suspended his own present.
Yet all of this lived mostly inside him. There was a boundary he never recognized—the fragile line between memory and reality. Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was an ideal untouched by time, an image unwilling to surrender to change.
To me, Daisy embodies the American Dream of the 1920s: beautiful, delicate, and shining. But the Daisy Gatsby meets again is no longer the one he remembers. She is now a wife, a mother, a woman who understands her feelings—yet never allows them to become decisions. She lives inside comfort, protected by an old-money husband: Tom Buchanan.
Tom Buchanan is aggressive and entitled, a representation of inherited power and polished cruelty. A man who owns his world without ever earning it.
I find myself agreeing with Murakami when he marvels at how Fitzgerald, at only twenty-nine years old, managed to portray life with such depth, warmth, and clarity. The more I read, the more the novel invites me to return—to question, to notice, to feel again.
Everything in The Great Gatsby feels like a moving painting. Each character exists not merely as a person, but as a symbol.
Take Biloxi, for instance—a complete stranger who appears at Daisy and Tom’s wedding, known by no one. He represents a crack in their social world. As if Fitzgerald were whispering that even the most intimate moments can be invaded by meaningless strangers. Their marriage, after all, is not sealed in love, but in cold social noise.
Fitzgerald also exposes the world’s quiet injustice with remarkable sharpness:
if you are fragile enough and rich enough, the world will clean up after you.
People like Daisy and Tom destroy things—and then retreat behind money and status. They are cowards.
Gatsby’s death is not solely Mr. Wilson’s doing. Daisy and Tom are deeply complicit—especially Tom, who never kills with his own hands, yet knows exactly where to point so the blood will never touch him.
Gatsby’s death slowly dismantles the myth of The Great Gatsby. It reminds me that true love does not look at what you have accumulated, but at who you are when everything is stripped away.
It also reveals something painfully simple: Gatsby built an entire world in order to be loved—yet almost no one truly loved him in return.
The parties were loud.
The funeral was quiet.
And in that silence, Gatsby finally became visible.
When I closed the book, I felt a hollow place in my chest. Like leaving a grand party, watching the lights go out one by one, and being forced to walk home alone through a cold, empty street.
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”
Perhaps we are all like Gatsby,
standing across the water,
believing—quietly—in a green light,
even when we know the past will always pull us back.
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