A Great Gatsby Book Report by a Kid Who Only Saw the Movie
By Jordan Asher Major Brogan III, age 16
The Great Gatsby is a very important and famous book which tells its story through many pages, all of which I enjoyed reading very much. It was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived from 1896 to 1940 and truly wrote many books. Through its use of characters, garbage falling from the sky all the time, and black people constantly playing the trumpet on a fire escape, The Great Gatsby is truly a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald about how you shouldn’t just buy a castle near your ex-girlfriend in the 1920s and then wait for her to fall back in love with you, because eventually you might get murdered by a poor person.
The main guy in the book is Nick Carraway, who seems like he probably has brown hair and blue eyes, not that I would know, as I only read about him in a book and haven’t seen what he looks like. Nick Carraway went to college and then moved to a dirty shack on Long Island, where he tries to make money using finance and mainly just follows his neighbors around staring like a weirdo. He is currently in a mental institution because he used to drink too much because of the ’20s, so he spends his time typing his recollections of Long Island on a magic typewriter that makes his words float up into the air like cheap visual effects in a movie. (Not that I watch movies. I prefer books.)
Nick Carraway has a cousin named Daisy. She’s married to Tom Buchanan, who is a really good actor. I mean character. He has a small mustache, probably. Daisy hates shirts, Tom Buchanan, and having a personality, but everyone seems to think she is a lot of fun to be around anyway. She’s pretty cute, I guess.
Next door to Nick Carraway is a big castle where a mysterious man named Gatsby lives. Gatsby is the most important man in town (and in the book—hence the title!!!), except that none of his friends or acquaintances has ever met or seen him, even though he is literally on the cover of the newspaper every day. Any time someone says “Gatsby,” everyone else is like, “Gatsby? Gatsby? What Gatsby? Where Gatsby? Show me the Gatsby!” but no one knows who he is. Gatsby is so mysterious, in fact, that even the drunk guy who lives in his library has never seen him! Until that stops being a convenient plot point, after which everyone is just like, “Oh, hey Gatsby, could you move, you’re blocking the polo game or whatever.”
So, Gatsby and Daisy used to date, before Gatsby had to go be in World War I and then hide so nobody would find out he was a secret poor. Now that he’s not poor anymore (because of alcohol crime) Gatsby throws a lot of parties hoping that Daisy will come over. The main thing you need to understand about life in the “roaring 1920s” is that it mainly consisted of a bunch of people standing in a fountain while a drunk guy played the pipe organ and servants dumped garbage all over the place and everyone is just screaming and screaming. The 1920s people loved it. As history shows, there were nine main people in New York at that time: Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Daisy, Tom Buchanan, a black guy playing the trumpet on a fire escape, Daisy’s friend, a dirty mechanic, his wife who is amorous, and her sister who is also amorous. After some events, life would never be the same.
Gatsby is obsessed with this green light across the water from his house. The green light represents Daisy, because Gatsby is “green” with envy that Tom Buchanan gets to hang out with her all the time, and also because green is the color of “go” and Gatsby would like to “go” over there.
Eventually Daisy comes over and says she would like to break up with Tom Buchanan and marry Gatsby instead, because of shirts. Everyone has a fight and eventually Gatsby dies, which represents death. The most important metaphor in The Great Gatsby is the shooting stars, which happen in the sky at least twice in every scene. The shooting stars represent the fact that Gatsby is the “star” of the book and somebody “shoots” him at the end. Aren’t we all a little bit like Gatsby in this modern world?
The Merriam-Webster English Dictionary defines “conclusion” as “the last part of something.” In conclusion, this is the last part of my report on The Great Gatsby, which is a very expensive book about confetti. It is truly the best book I have ever read all the way through.
