When I was in eleventh grade, we delved into The Great Gatsby.

Solid book. Invaluable advice. Compelling characters. Easy to get lost in.

However, there was this point at which my English teacher had us read this critique (so help me God) that asserted, after dozens and dozens of re-reads, the novel was NOT a love story. Let me be clear. The humor of the novella, the entire reason people latch onto it, is that it is a comically horrendous love story of everything failing.

Just because it is a bad example to strive for doesn’t make it irrelevant. If every bad recorded decision were struck from documentation, we would have literally zero instances of formally recorded history. Every document would basically be a math textbook or an early-age reader, maintaining neutral objectivity.

When we go to prove that the intent behind a story precludes its usefulness, we forget that some stories are meant to be anecdotal flops. When I first read The Great Gatsby, there was this misunderstanding of what it stood for. We hyperfocused on that its claim to fame was the allegory of the American Dream, with the green light at the end representing the failure of man to achieve his own destiny.

While that critic claimed the failure was it being beloved for its romance, I think the failure is the inability of people to admit a good Oedipus fan fiction. (I may do this as a whole post, comparing the two as a rationale to explain power needs to be held in high regard, because one slight misuse of it spirals out of control.)

See, my philosophy on people is that we want a relatable story.

There’s nothing worse, and I mean nothing, than being told the goal in life is to be perfect without any training. So when we see a story with relatable characters whose fatal flaws cause insurmountable choas spirals, all at the behest of making some pretty boy from out of town validated in his illusion, we see that the world isn’t so scary and that we’re expected to fail; that failure is utlimately redeemable.

In psychology, there is this theory that every person is the master of their narrative and thus the ultimate key in helping a client change is helping them work though the questions and answers through value assessments. A therapist is there to illicit ethical change, meaning you come in ready to communicate honestly.

The Great Gatsby is thus a narrative example of how believing we don’t need guidance is ultimately the difference between success and failure. The critic was right in that it was not a love story at its core. Yet she failed to realize that the love story was the plotline, that the ultimate American Dream includes having someone to share the joys of life with. The joke of the critique was that she ignored the novella’s conclusory failure, citing its relevance as obsolete to being relatable.

In ignoring the plot of a novel whose takeaway tends to be that we set unachievable dreams for ourselves, she proved that her goal was to show the insignificance of narratization as demonstrated through inaccurate characters. Her critique crushed my soul because she openly admitted that she couldn’t buy into the expectations set forth through the novel’s premise.

The trouble with analytical critiques is that most of them aren’t written by people whose goal is to maintain an assumption that the piece of media was liked. See, she was not saying, here’s a critique on IF the novel is valuable. Her critique was on why the novel wasn’t, and it is because she didn’t buy into the novel’s premise.

Expectation setting, in practice, enhances our interactions with stories. When people don’t like performances, they are functionally saying that they couldn’t hold enough suspension of disbelief throughout the entire story. A story well-liked is one whose world is simple enough to understand that we can allow ourselves to believe, for even a little bit, that the plausability of life falls neatly within. If we cannot relate to the world set forth in the book, in ANY regard, we look for a plothole.

Good plotholes are ones whose presence only shows logical deficits. Bad plotholes expose that the expectations of the world are too malleable, too flexible, too poorly thought out for the depth of the most relatable subquest.

See, a good story allows us to accept that there are things we don’t understand and that the novel will guide us toward some comprehension on them. What the critic essentially said, which may have been all too true, was that The Great Gatsby ultimately has bad instruction. But what my English teacher failed to recognize was that the critique is pointless to high school students with enough senses of self to discern between literature as allegory and literature as guidance.

When we talk to people, we must then be careful to point them toward considering how to get the objective accomplished. Communication is about setting expectations and goals clearly, concisely, and in a way that being heard is demonstrated.

The joke?

In my annoyance of her critique when I was younger, I admitted that my expectations as a reader were that she understood the audience, not that she felt she had to solve a problem that didn’t actually exist to begin with.

XOXO,

Dorothy B