The Novel You Cannot Read the Same Way Twice
I was assigned The Great Gatsby at 16 and remembered it as a novel about a rich man who throws parties and is sad about a woman. I reread it at 30 and found a novel about the specific delusion of believing that the past can be recovered if you simply want it enough. Gatsby's tragedy is not that he cannot have Daisy. It is that he cannot accept that the version of her he wants no longer exists and perhaps never did. At 30, that particular delusion felt much more familiar than it had at 16.
Finding Fitzgerald more precise about delusion than I did at twenty
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rereading The Great Gatsby
Impact
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Section
Thinking about what other novels assigned in secondary school I have completely misread and should reread now with whatever I have learned since.