Overheard my book club arguing about 'The Great Gatsby' for 45 minutes straight

I was at the library last Tuesday picking up holds and walked past this heated book club debate about whether Gatsby was actually a good guy or just a rich creep. One lady kept saying he was romantic and misunderstood, but this other guy pointed out he literally let a woman take the blame for a car accident. It got me thinking about how much our own experiences shape what we see in a character. My book club usually just talks about snacks and who forgot to read, so this was a whole different level. How do your clubs handle characters that split the room like that? Do you ever come to a majority vote or just agree to disagree?

3 comments

3 Comments

shaneb1626d ago

That line about "our own experiences shape what we see in a character" hits home. My club had a huge blowup over "The Catcher in the Rye" where half the room thought Holden was a whiny brat and the other half saw a traumatized kid. We ended up doing this thing where we wrote down our own high school "low points" on slips of paper (anonymous, you know) and read them out loud. It totally changed how people saw him because suddenly we were all connecting our own dumb teenage mistakes to his story. We still disagreed but it stopped being about right or wrong and more about sharing where we were coming from.

xena_fox3925d agoMost Upvoted

@shaneb16 that exercise is smart. Holden is one of those characters where your age determines your take. Read him at 15 and you think he gets it. Read him at 30 and you wonder why nobody told him to just chill. The anonymous low points idea probably showed how everyone has those moments where they sound ridiculous but feel crushed. Good way to kill the "he's just a brat" argument without making it personal.

graygonzalez19d ago

Dropped my own low point in that hat and realized I was probably bigger whiner than Holden at sixteen.