The promised book post
Yesterday I did something that I had previously told myself I'd never do: I reread The Great Gatsby. I first encountered this book as required reading in high school and predictably hated it. Recently, someone who loves it convinced me to give it another try, having argued convincingly that one needs life experience to appreciate all its merits. So, I've read it again. I do not love this book like my acquaintance does, but I also do not hate it. I now understand for the first time how someone could love it, and my reasons for not loving it are rather different from the reasons I hated it before.
I'm not the sort of reader who normally notices or cares very much about the stylistic quality of the language with which a story is told. I'm more a fan of storytelling than of literature. But even I have to admit that Fitzgerald's use of language is here a great thing in its own right, painting vivid scenes and keeping them zipping along one right after the other. The book dragged for me in high school, but as an adult, I devoured it at a pace I normally reserve for action-packed stories that make me eager to find out what happens next. I still don't like any of the characters, but I now understand, in a way I didn't when I was younger, that I'm not necessarily supposed to. And even though I don't like any of them, I do recognize them now, whereas I didn't have enough real world experience to recognize them before. The problems that I have with the story now are all the same ones I have with all the other well-regarded stories by Famous Dead White Guys and many of the Not-As-Famous Living White Guys.
The main lesson I have taken away from the experience is that The Great Gatsby should not be required reading for high school students because they won't understand it and they'll end up hating it for all the wrong reasons. It makes me wonder why this is ever assigned to high school students in the first place. Its themes are not ones that make sense to most high school students. I mean, yeah, they know what adultery is, but they don't grasp the full social significance of it and probably won't even notice how much it recurs in the books. It's obvious that Tom is having an affair with Mrs. Wilson and that Gatsby wants to have an affair with Daisy, but as a teenager I honestly did not notice that adultery is all over the background. Teenagers might have a rudimentary grasp of the distinction between old money and nouveau riche, but very, very few of them have ever seen that kind of snobbery in action, and the ones who have seen it surely didn't understand all the implications. The themes of the work that really stood out for me on my second reading are disillusionment and the futility of trying to recover lost chances-- not themes that seventeen-year-olds are likely to pick up on! They still have too many of their illusions. They have not had enough time to make much of an attempt to recover their lost chances. No themes stood out to me on my long-ago first reading, and there's a reason for that.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/65781.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
I'm not the sort of reader who normally notices or cares very much about the stylistic quality of the language with which a story is told. I'm more a fan of storytelling than of literature. But even I have to admit that Fitzgerald's use of language is here a great thing in its own right, painting vivid scenes and keeping them zipping along one right after the other. The book dragged for me in high school, but as an adult, I devoured it at a pace I normally reserve for action-packed stories that make me eager to find out what happens next. I still don't like any of the characters, but I now understand, in a way I didn't when I was younger, that I'm not necessarily supposed to. And even though I don't like any of them, I do recognize them now, whereas I didn't have enough real world experience to recognize them before. The problems that I have with the story now are all the same ones I have with all the other well-regarded stories by Famous Dead White Guys and many of the Not-As-Famous Living White Guys.
The main lesson I have taken away from the experience is that The Great Gatsby should not be required reading for high school students because they won't understand it and they'll end up hating it for all the wrong reasons. It makes me wonder why this is ever assigned to high school students in the first place. Its themes are not ones that make sense to most high school students. I mean, yeah, they know what adultery is, but they don't grasp the full social significance of it and probably won't even notice how much it recurs in the books. It's obvious that Tom is having an affair with Mrs. Wilson and that Gatsby wants to have an affair with Daisy, but as a teenager I honestly did not notice that adultery is all over the background. Teenagers might have a rudimentary grasp of the distinction between old money and nouveau riche, but very, very few of them have ever seen that kind of snobbery in action, and the ones who have seen it surely didn't understand all the implications. The themes of the work that really stood out for me on my second reading are disillusionment and the futility of trying to recover lost chances-- not themes that seventeen-year-olds are likely to pick up on! They still have too many of their illusions. They have not had enough time to make much of an attempt to recover their lost chances. No themes stood out to me on my long-ago first reading, and there's a reason for that.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/65781.html. Please comment there using OpenID.