The Great American Novel

Let's start this with getting one thing right. This single assortment of phrases and paragraphs is the single most important contribution to American Literature in the 20th Century. You don't have to completely agree with that statement just understand the impetus behind it.

Why don't we go through it all and I can show you why it's so important and why it will dictate the form in which this journal will be headed.

The Great Gatsby

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. An amazing start, talking about the vulnerability of youth and its incredible power in shaping who we will later become.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

The essence of this story, words from my Father. Note that this is the first and only reference to his parents and that it is a male relationship rather than one with his mother.

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. Incredibly important dealing with the issues of emotion and weakness as perceived in relationships between men in America. Has to deal with the fact that many of us yearn for a deeper emotional connection with our fathers yet glean so little from them. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. States of mind, patterns of behavior, Nick Carraway is dealing with operating at a perceived higher emotional plain and how he has to wrestle with that inequality when dealing with most people. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. There we go, once more unto the breach, this is the penultimate statement of the most importance, stating that those of us who display non-normal characteristics are singled out as trustworthy or somehow better than most others. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. There it is, the key to this whole discourse. The entire way you express yourself when taking other people into confidence is wrong and subjugated by your own beliefs and biases. People suppress themselves because they must operate under the idea that they still have a level of control no matter what. That is plain wrong and self-destructive. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. That is why it is of so much worth, the fundamental decencies and the understanding of humanity and the way we treat others is wildly prevalent in others and sadly lacking in others. A simple sad fact about humanity.