The Great Gatsby

I've had a very hard time trying to define what I think a Literary Work is. I ended up googling it and the most popular answer was "The work of the writer expressed in the letters of the alphabet especially when considered the point of view of style and effect." This is really broad. After reading this I started to come up with my own interpretation of literary work. I feel that all literary works are setting out to make a point about a topic. 

For this week we read the Great Gatsby with the recent release of the movie The New Yorker reviewed the movie saying "Baz Luhrmann’s "The Great Gatsby" is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodramatic American classic." I think this is the most perfect definition of the Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby just feels like a trashy reality tv show from the 1920's. The book glorifies the idea of the American Dream, and how incredibly unachievable it is. The environment of the West Egg is so artificial, and everything is done just to impress others. Gatsby who is the symbol for the American Dream who has created this bootleg empire. Is never totally accepted by the wealthy society. He tries to be even more opulent then the old money crowd by throwing extravagant parties every week. It is sad to see his struggle to try and have everything which in his circumstance is pretty impossible.

Even though I am not very fond of the book it still is a literary work. The point of the book seems to focus on the death of the American dream. It also touches on the giant gap between the rich and the poor. I think that these themes are still pretty relevant in todays society. The rich like in the Great Gatsby have no care or disregard for the poor. They are just stuck in their own little worlds of opulence and overindulgence.