So We Beat On
The Great Gatsby is not the book you remember from high school
When I sat down last summer to read The Great Gatsby in preparation for the debut episode of the podcast, which we’re revisiting this week as Jeff and I give our brains and eyeballs a much-needed break, it had been a couple of decades since my last visit to West Egg.
I knew the experience of reading this book at 42 would be different from my first encounter with the text at 16 or 17, but wow, did I underestimate it. Within the first few pages, I was struck with a conviction that would endure throughout the reading: high school is the exact wrong time to read this book. Whatever your take on it was in your younger and more vulnerable years, it’s worth a look with grown-up eyes.
When I first read The Great Gatsby in high school, I understood it as a book about yearning, a subject teenagers get on a cellular level. Jay Gatsby stood in his yard at night and stared at the green light on Daisy’s dock because dude had it bad for a girl he couldn’t have. Longing, unrequited love, social ambition, grand gestures that are destined to fail: what are angst-ridden adolescents better equipped to relate to?
The thing is, though, that Gatsby isn’t about that kind of yearning. It’s not actually about wanting someone you can’t have, but about wanting a whole (past) life you can’t have. It’s about the danger of clinging to a vision you’ll never be able to realize—because time only moves in one direction—and the destruction you can wreak when you’re willing to pull everyone down the vortex with you. That’s adult shit. And though Fitzgerald wasn’t even 30 when The Great Gatsby came out, it feels like distinctly middle-aged shit today.
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The way to read Gatsby and feel its wisdom in your bones is to wait until you’ve been alive long enough to have loved something—a person, a dream, a story about yourself—and lost it, and been tempted to hold on anyway. The Great Gatsby is a cautionary tale about something most of us learn the hard way: the past is an ash heap. Dig through it long enough, and you’ll destroy not just your present but your future too.
I agree that we should read The Great Gatsby as adults. I also believe it's perfect for high school. I don't, however, agree with the way it's taught most of the time.
I hate that it's taught as THE novel about the corrupt American Dream. I hate that the lessons usually come with color imagery graphs. I hate that most teachers don't explore the humor, because it is absolutely there.
When a teacher can guide students through the social expectations of the characters, students actually start to see very high school-ish behavior. They start to relate. Tom is the popular jock. Jay is the new guy disrupter. Nick is a wanna be. He's the good kid trying to remain good but also wanting to be cool, but he can't bring himself to really sink that low (simultaneously in and out). Daisy is the "it" girl. Jordan is the best friend who is both in awe of and sick of Daisy.
Teaching the novel in a more "teenage" way introduces them to a phenomenal book that they might just pick up again as adults.
That’s a good take on the book. I’ll read it again! I’m almost 70 and have been through a lot since I was 15. 😶
TGG is taught in high school because it’s an excellent example of symbolism and metaphor in fiction writing (I remember the eye in the optometrist’s sign!), the use of themes, and so on. Structure. FSF was good at building the armature of a story. I was thinking about what classroom discussions might look like today, so I poked around and found this:
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5296888/teaching-gatsby-at-100
Now I’m curious to see how this book holds up, 100 years after publication.