From the beginning the similarities were obvious.
Let's start with the title. "The Great Lenore?" It's obviously a playoff of the name "The Great Gatsby" used to clue the readers that there may be plot parallels in the book.
And there were a lot of plot parallels in the book.
Thomas Foster notes in "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" that there is really only one story. The story is just retold in different ways.
"The Great Lenore" and "The Great Gatsby" back up this idea.
In a lot of ways they were one story, just set a few decades apart.
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The Plots:
Boy meets Girl. Girl and Boy fall in love. Girl meets new Boy who treats her badly and they marry. Girl and original Boy meet again. Original Boy dies in a tragic way. Girl is shown to be shallow and returns to Boy who treats her badly. Narrator is profoundly changed by the entire thing because he's young and naive. Both stories deal with love, tragedy and guilt. The same themes that have been used in thousands of pieces of literature. Many of which I'm sure inspired "The Great Gatsby." So if the story line and the themes are the same within the two books, what's the point of reading both of them?
Even though they're pretty similar, they're still different pieces of literature. The differences just lie in the details. The settings, the tone, the characters. Since "The Great Lenore" was pretty obviously based off of "The Great Gatsby", the slight differences in the novels helped me see "The Great Gatsby" in a different way.
An example of this is Lenore's staged death in "The Great Lenore". If we acknowledge that Daisy and Lenore play similar characters we can analyze the fact that Lenore stages her death to get away from her unfaithful husband, and Daisy does not. Daisy does however mention to Nick how difficult a time she is having and how she wishes she could get away. I used to think that this was because Lenore was tougher. Lenore was strong enough to run away. I don't think so anymore. I think Lenore's staged death emphasizes and mirrors Daisy's spoken desire to leave. It's just shown in larger terms in "The Great Lenore" so readers won't miss it.
In Conclusion...
I actually liked reading "The Great Lenore" more than reading "The Great Gatsby." I know this is crazy. "The Great Gatsby" is a classic. Who am I to dare say that "The Great Lenore" may have been a better book? I understand that "The Great Gatsby" was revolutionary in its time period. I also understand that the author of "The Great Lenore", J.M. Tohline cannot take full credit for his characters as they were almost all based off of characters in Fitzgerald's Gatsby. Yet of the two books, I found "The Great Lenore" much easier to connect with and much more enjoyable to read. Perhaps it's because we no longer live in the Jazz Age and a few of the references in "The Great Gatsby" eluded me. Perhaps it's because it's because Tohline's descriptions and imagery were brilliant and made me feel like I was actually living the book. More likely, it's because by the end of the book I found I hated Lenore WAY more than I hated Daisy. When you find yourself seriously angry for hours on end at a fictional character, you know you've just read a really good book. It means the author has successfully played your emotions like a puppet.
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