The Great Gatsby is a good book that suffers from being over-hyped and described as the "Great American Novel." While I certainly enjoyed of "changing the past," I found Nick Carraway to be a wholly unsatisfying narrator, and either Fitzgerald revealed less about him than Gatsby or I tuned out many of the details about Nick's life because I DIDN'T CARE. Nick stays aloof from all the events that transpire and acts as if they affect him in only a trivial way, even though he is dating one of the central characters. He never feels very emotionally invested in the scene, and the best attempt he ever makes at relating to the other central characters is to feel slightly embarrassed and self-conscious while Tom and Gatsby argue in the Plaza Hotel. Fitzgerald makes Nick feel like these events that transpire in New York are only mild occurrences in Nick's life. 
 The love triangle involving Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom is an old storyline that is made fresh by the backdrop (foreign to today's readers) of the Roaring Twenties. Gatsby's opulent parties and fortunes make him seem like a character of infinite power, even though it becomes clear thanks to Daisy's hesitations that Jay Gatsby the thrower-of-parties is merely an assumed persona. Here I have to point out that Fitzgerald has done something right, the story unfolds brilliantly, and as it goes on we try to discover what really happened in the past. It could be argued that Gatsby is actually the protagonist as opposed to Nick, who acts more like a reporter than an active participant. Indeed, Nick gives himself the least credit, as a narrator, for what role he played in the lifetime of the Great Gatsby, and his relative distance is what compelled me to give the book a 3-star rating. 
 What separates American literature from that of, say, English literature, is that American literature focuses heavily on the most extraordinary events of a person's life. American literature did not dichotomize itself from it's English counterparts with a stream-of-consciousness style of writing or merely a cross-section of an ordinary life, it focused on the most important things to ever happen to a group of people. "O Captan! My Captain!" was not written from the perspective of a slave to the events of the piece, it was written from the perspective of a man who cared deeply for the captain he sailed with. While The Great Gatsby certainly chronicles the most important events in Jay Gatsby's life, and possibly Daisy Buchanan's, Nick's relative detachment to the love affairs going on made the whole thing feel unimportant. If as a country we decide to pick a single novel to hold up and say, "This is the essence of our people, read this and you can comprehend the soul of America," then The Great Gatsby is not the best book we have for the role.