A Matter Of Perspective

Madhu Jain reminisces about the books that she grew up with and discovers that the passage of time sometimes changes their understanding and impact….

- Madhu Jain

The other morning, two colleagues in Verve’s sister publication The Indian Quarterly were talking with me about our respective and changing relationships with books and films down the decades. american novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby kept popping up in our discussion. read in adolescence, the novel was a captivating and tragic love story about a mysterious and wealthy man who moved from the Midwest to Long Island on the eastern shore, into a huge gothic mansion. Here, he threw lavish and wild parties every Saturday night to impress Daisy, his former girlfriend who was married to the born-to-wealth Tom Buchanan.

UNDERLYING THEMES

Decades later, Fitzgerald’s prose remains iridescent. However, deeper meanings surface. These alter both our understanding of the novel set during the roaring twenties and, of course, our silent conversations with it. not to mention the friction between classes and the relationships of those belonging to different backgrounds and religions. The billionaire protagonist has changed his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, hiding the fact that he is Jewish and not to any manor born. Buchanan is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WaSP) from a privileged, family with old money and recipient of a blue-chip education.