:INFO
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.


:NOW
Finding Fitzgerald more precise about delusion than I did at twenty

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:F. Scott Fitzgerald]
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.


:JOURNEY
Rereading The Great Gatsby
3 Least interesting
4 Excess as cover
5 Impossibility of return
5 Great final paragraph

:NOW
Thinking about what other novels assigned in secondary school I have completely misread and should reread now with whatever I have learned since.

:POLL
Did rereading The Great Gatsby as an adult change how you understood it?
Yes completely, I had missed the point as a teenager
Somewhat, I appreciated it more but the core was the same
Not much, I had a good first reading and the reread confirmed it
I have not reread it since school