On My Third First Reading

I may have read The Great Gatsby more than three times, but I remember three times distinctly. Each time, it felt like I was reading a slightly different book, when the truth is that it was just a slightly different person reading it.

The first time I read The Great Gatsby was in ninth grade when I was fourteen. It was the most breathtakingly beautiful book I had ever read. Gatsby himself was like something from a heavenly dream. The fact that there was adultery didn't stand out in my memory.

The second time I read The Great Gatsby was the fall of 2013. I was nineteen and doing very badly. I read a lot of the book on a good friend's suspicious couch (I think it had been taken from the road side) next to someone I'm glad I'm not close to anymore. I remember feeling, as Daisy describes herself, "pretty cynical about everything." What stuck out to me was how both beautiful and tainted everything about the book was, and how much that felt like life. (I hadn't even read The Beautiful and the Damned yet.)

I'm reading The Great Gatsby for at least the third time now. I'm twenty-seven. The book feels very, very different this time. It is still breathtakingly beautiful—I have to read some sentences two or three times just to enjoy them—but it's also...disappointing. It feels like disappointment. This is not a criticism of Fitzgerald; it's a praise.

This time, Jay Gatsby doesn't feel invincible and perfect the way I remember him from my two earlier readings. He feels insecure. He feels like a man who could be great—and isn't quite. For the first time I'm seeing that the title might be tongue in cheek, sarcastic.

Nick hits different in general too. I'm noticing more of his sarcasm and disapproval, even though he says he's "inclined to reserve all judgements." Is he? Should he be? Should we be? Should we be inclined to reserve ALL judgements, or are some things unwise, unkind, unacceptable, regardless of the advantages an actor might be lacking?

I'm not sure what I thought the message of The Great Gatsby was before. I think I understood that it was about being versus seeming, the hollowness of wealth, the carelessness of some people, but I don't know that I felt the message before. The book felt magical and full. This time, I can sense the ominous hollowness that Fitzgerald so artfully inserted between every letter.

I can't wait for my thirty-five-year-old self to read this book.

~Stephanie

P.S. I can't recommend this book more. The 2013 movie version is also one of my favorite movie adaptations of a book ever.