Week Two: The Great Gatsby as a Literary Work

Writing Assignment: Write a 350-500 word blog post discussing why, in your view, The Great Gatsby is a literary work.

In order to answer the question of whether or not The Great Gatsby is a literary work I had to question what exactly defines a literary work. The broadest definition I found is anything expressed in letters of the alphabet. Other definitions define a literary work as any body of work from a societies culture as well as any creative work that is deemed to have artistic value. But who gets to decide if a work has enough artistic value or not? I suppose it’s up to the reader to decide. As a reader of The Great Gatsby I believe that it has enough artistic qualities, such as a stylized storyline and plot as well as identifiable characters, to qualify as a literary work. The Great Gatsby allowed me to take a glimpse back at the culture of the roaring 20’s in a high-class society and into the lives and events of various characters. The content and language Fitzgerald used is very rich and stylized and helps to create a sense of what the American Dream at the time meant to the people of that era. That really allowed me to get a feel of the time Fitzgerald and the characters he created lived in.