A New Way to Read Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald never explicitly states Jay Gatsby's race.

- By Alonzo Vereen

Of all the books in the 10th-grade curriculum, the class set of The Great Gatsby was what we teachers most coveted. Short enough to cover in one quarter, F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel was also packed with symbolism-Dr. Eckleburg's eyes on the billboard, the green light at the end of the dock, the cars, the music. And it was weighty enough to support multiple readings. I imagined my first year of teaching bursting with rich discussions. But to start any conversation, I had to secure the books before the other teachers got them.

I succeeded, only to be deflated: My students fought Gatsby from the beginning. The teenagers in my classroom-all children of color living in an impoverished rural community in South Florida, many of them first-generation Americans whose parents had come from Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, or Guatemala-simply did not understand a majority of the words on the page. Any appeal I made to the sheer pleasures of the text fell flat. "Surely," I'd say with as much enthusiasm as possible, "you think this part is funny!" And I'd launch into a reading of Nick Carraway's opening narration: “Frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon." Silence. Eventually, one brave soul would raise a hand. "What's 'feigned'?"