The Great Gatsby: If you went to high school in the United States, your parents read it, you’ve read it, your friends have some vague memory of the green light and Daisy and Nick, and your kids probably will too. I read The Great Gatsby: If you went to high school in the United States, your parents read it, you’ve read it, your friends have some vague memory of the green light and Daisy and Nick, and your kids probably will too. I read it in high school and college, and now am a member of the great tribe of high school teachers who put it on our American Literature syllabi year after year, 100 years after its publication. Almost no text is so ubiquitously found in classrooms, which is also why it often draws righteous indignation and constant interrogation: Do more people need to read this, again? Is there really nothing else that would serve the same purpose? Are we being lazy educators, perpetuating a system that mindlessly privileges a few texts, identities, etc.?
These are questions I ask every year, and every year, I choose again to teach it. The reasons are multifarious: I believe there is value in a canon (how many texts are we able to discuss with our peers, parents, and children?); I also think, contrary to the identitarian objection, the text raises interesting and relevant questions of class, gender, etc. But most importantly, Gatsby cares about language. Few texts so carefully ensure the fluidity or the languor of a sentence mirrors its function; few make you feel the slap of an em-dash or the runaway car of a string of commas. Gatsby doesn’t just tell you a story, it teaches you how to love language. In a world of identity politics, the ascendancy of tech, finance, and optimization, language itself is an increasingly rare concern. The art of paying careful attention to language is one we purport to teach in class. We call it close reading. I think Gatsby is a text that both represents and defends close reading. And it does need defending.
Recently, literary critic John Guillory published On Close Reading, which explores the slippery nature of the act, something we do but rarely define in the literary world. Guillory says that close reading is learning to spell out your thinking. The book sparked some discourse over the value and nature of close reading. Notably, the writer Naomi Kanakia published a Substack obliterating close reading, especially as it is taught in high school. She tells a parable of the student whose teacher says to her about, yes, Gatsby: “Well now that we’ve told you to look for symbols, are you able to find them at all?” This question encapsulates everything wrong with close reading for the student. In her opinion, students are taught to “spew bullshit.” This is not a new critique. Kanakia’s writing echoes that of an article, published over a decade ago in the Atlantic, called “Stop Close Reading” which defined the act as “taking a chapter, a page, a paragraph, or even a single sentence, and picking it apart to extract meaning or see what the author is doing.” Or, what Kanakia might see as a “schooling in sophistry.”
I think there’s some truth in this. To be told there is a symbolic order that you need to systematically decode would suck the joy out of reading. But I don’t think that’s what is at the core of close reading. The problem the Atlantic and critics like Kanakia take offense to is not in fact close reading, but forced meaning. Forced meaning is predicated on the notion that we can, like a machine, drill into a text and extract all its value, sucking it up and dashing on to the next mineral-rich sentence. This orientation to texts implies that meaning comes easily if you apply the right combination of machinery and willpower. It is the mindset of Silicon Valley execs and optimizing (dare I say DOGE) entrepreneurs I spent all my undergrad years trying to avoid, who seek out “hacks” to existential woes (effective altruism, transhumanism, etc.). This extractive motion suggests that close reading is a thing we do to the text rather than a thing that the text reveals to us, from the natural, arduous, circuitous, and sometimes unyielding process of returning to it.
I think a better interpretation of close reading can be derived from the Latin roots of the word text: texere, to weave. Historically, stories were woven into tapestries, a lá Athena, and Arachne, but weaving is also the motion of storytelling: straying and returning, creating a throughline. This art is parallel to the act of close reading: the natural act of straying and returning to a text with renewed vision. Good teaching doesn’t thrust students into symbolic order, but pushes them to return to the text and ask: What, because of my encounter with the book, is bringing me back? What is here that I didn’t see before that might cause me to look again? Close reading, then, is not a prescribed system of thought, but a natural result of being moved to return to the text, by curiosity, rage, confusion, or even — as I experience repeatedly with Gatsby — delight. It is upon returning that the text opens and new meanings unfold — deep, strange, or counterintuitive. This is not an “extractive” process, as the Atlantic would have it. We don’t take anything from these texts; we feel our way toward something new that was already there waiting to be seen. I think Gatsby is itself a tribute to this act, one that is worth investing in, protecting, and, yes, teaching.
If close reading is the act of returning to a text many times, which often comes from caring a lot about a text, it’s also possible it can work in reverse: that returning to a text could make you care about it in new and unexpected ways. Certainly, that has happened each year I’ve returned to Gatsby as a teacher. Certainly it’s what I hope my students take away from looking carefully at the language over and over; but let me take you for a tour of my own returns and you can judge for yourself.
YEAR ONE: MONEY
The first time I teach Gatsby it’s in New York on the seventh floor of a 10-story building that was once a meat-packing plant in the heart of Chelsea. The school is known for its tuition (high) and the iPads (one per student), as well as the line of black cars out front (door-to-door service). Across the street is a New York City Housing Authority project. Nowhere is there a better study of the blindness of social classes to one another, the intermingling without touching, the endless distances between groups that share such close quarters.
That first year, Gatsby’s depiction of wealth seems to me the thing that forever recommends it to syllabi in schools like mine. The text parades as an advertisement for the luxurious parties and lavish lifestyle, when hidden beneath this promising facade is a critique of the very thing that many “lay readers” take away from it. Take the parent-teacher association at my school, which threw a Gatsby-themed party a few years before I arrived. My parents had a Gatsby-themed wedding, one student proclaims, proudly, before we begin.
Soon into the text, the kids begin to observe Gatsby’s manifold layers: the sumptuousness of the language alongside the vacuousness of the reality being described. We look at the social codes embedded into each sentence, starting with the way our narrator Nick describes the workers he passes on the train through the “valley of ashes” as “ash-grey men.” I wonder aloud what the difference is between ash-covered, or dirty, and ash-grey. The students understand, immediately, that ash-grey is an immutable trait, an indelible part of the workers’ characters. It takes a minute for everyone to realize just how radical a claim those two words are making. They say: You are forever made of the material from whence you came. The ash-grey men are forever doomed to be remnants, burnt detritus that fuels the rest of us as we pass by, hardly even realizing what we’re seeing if we don’t look carefully. It’s the first glimpse students have of the way that Nick watching the world mirrors the way they look at the text: his passivity doesn’t excuse him from his participation in the system that blinds one class to another. In another way, it might raise the uncomfortable question: Of what material am I made? Gold? Pyrite? Lithium? Ink? And if our stuff is as immutable as the ash, wouldn’t that imply that nothing we have — the spot in the private school, for instance — was earned? It was just built in? That we didn’t earn our places any more than the people earned their spots in the housing next door is radical. It’s uncomfortable, which is why it is obscured behind the “impenetrable cloud” of ashes in the book.
But of course this is the point — the world is built for us, on the 7th floor of our private school, to stay “safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.” Then, the point of English class is being forced to look again, down those seven floors, at the world as it is, and, hopefully, also, at ourselves.
You’d be right to be skeptical.
Will noticing the way that the phrase a “touch of a butler’s thumb” isolates the part of the butler’s body that does the work — thus reducing him to his economic function and stripping him of humanity — really make the kids scrutinize their privilege? Will it make them see more clearly the invisible work that happens at their school, in their homes and their second homes? Perhaps that’s too hopeful, too Denzel-meets-Robin-Williams, redeeming kids’ souls through literature class. At the same time, I think pointing out the relationship between language and social value does do something. It makes us consider the way language can reflect attitudes latent in our everyday lives; that to use this word, rather than that, is not random, but revelatory of some truth, slightly more abstract but no less significant; it shows that there is value in paying attention — it reveals the richness, strangeness, and complexity of the world — and that attending requires, often, returning to the text. This, I think, is the core of close reading: attending and returning, which is what we have to do to realize the radical statement baked into the ash-grey men. It’s also what makes teaching inherently a practice of close reading, because each year, I must return.
YEAR TWO: LOVE
The second year I teach Gatsby, the students are new, the classroom is new, and therefore the text becomes new to me. Outside of class, I am also newly in the process of falling in love, and embroiled in the embarrassingly cliched motions of a self-conscious mind — waiting to text, worrying my gifts were too big or small, my comments alluring or off-putting, posting pictures online somewhat out of the ordinary as subtle messages or prompts to pique interest, checking to see if she looked at my stories. From this year of romance, a new scene emerges from the ashes that I didn’t pay as much attention to the year before: the night before meeting Daisy, for the first time in years, Gatsby’s house is “lit from tower to cellar.” When asked about the situation, Gatsby tells Nick, “I have been glancing into some of the rooms.” This small interaction is often overlooked by the students (and me), and when I ask what was he doing in there? they often have to refer back to the opening pages. Some part of this feels like the first step of close reading: returning to the scene of the crime to understand what the text really said, to actually read, rather than skimming and hazarding a guess.
So why would Gatsby be looking into the rooms, obsessively, all night? Why would all the lights need to be on? And why would it take on the appearance of the world’s fair — a carnival, a show? He could be having a party, but no one is there; he could be pacing randomly; or, he could be — someone always gets us there — anticipating his meeting with Daisy, picturing the moment she will witness the life he has created with her in mind. How contemporary! I exclaim. How well Fitzgerald understood the mechanism of self-surveillance brought on by an obsessive crush! What better represents the phenomenon of the Instagram story (or whatever the kids use these days) than looking at your own house, the thing you know best, through the imagined eyes of the Other? A perfect analog, it seems, for scouring your own pictures, desperate for the one (oh too familiar) icon, to show up, to confirm she has seen you as you have curated yourself. How many thousands of people have seen these rooms (these stories)? I ask the students. And yet, only this one person matters. My students intuitively understand the modernity of Gatsby in this moment: the way we are encouraged to transform the self into image, to turn the human into a personal “brand,” for the eyes of the person whose approval we most crave. And yet, without returning to that moment in the book, we might not catch it.
In a way, Gatsby’s obsessive scrutiny stands in for an act of close reading itself. His continuous nightlong return suggests the uncertainty and the thrill of the new reader. Just as we may never know what the definitive symbolic “meaning” is, he can never know what Daisy will experience by looking at his own house. But by looking carefully, over and over, he imagines the possibilities therein. I think this is what I have seen, but could there be more? Could I have missed a detail?
At some point, my students start to debate whether Gatsby’s obsession is romantic or creepy. He holds onto one summer-long fling for five years (romantic?). He holds a night-long “vigil” over her house even when it is clear she has chosen another man (creepy!). Through Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows how close reading can be extractive, turning into a search for the symbol we want and ignoring all else. But Gatsby’s movements reveal to us the reasons we might be compelled to return to something in the first place: because it has struck us as absolutely necessary; because we have become obsessed.
A model of better close reading in this text is Nick, our questionable narrator (questionable because, why is he there at all?). An answer comes in the opening pages: Nick finds attractive Gatsby’s “romantic readiness” and “infinite capacity for hope” (ironically also the qualities, enumerated above, that cripple his ability to see Daisy clearly).
So Nick is there to guide us to see the great in Gatsby.
Yet, when we do hear about Gatsby from Nick’s point of view, we realize we are looking at a self-made man obsessed with his image, who ultimately dies alone, lonely, with no one at his funeral. In one passage, Nick describes:
I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
The strangeness of the passage is enhanced by the way Nick seems to blend into the mind of Gatsby himself. After the first sentence, the phrases seem to come from Gatsby’s own experience. This gentle dipping into the mind of another is a narrative move called free indirect discourse (is there a more “close reading” term?). In many ways, free indirect discourse is as close as we can get to merging consciousnesses with another person. Normally it is the author who does this with his characters to illuminate their subjective experience, but in this case it’s Nick to Gatsby. Here, free indirect discourse is the result of Nick’s desire to truly understand Gatsby both in his grandeur and his foolishness; it comes from his deep care for this inscrutable neighbor.
Is it possible that Nick loveees Gatsby (many students wonder about this)? Regardless of the nature of his love, here we get a justification for Nick’s presence. He is the only one left who has continuously returned to Gatsby, both literally (to his home, his aid, his funeral), and narratively — the story is told retrospectively. The layered understanding of his grandeur and his emptiness comes from the many obsessive years we imagine Nick spends mulling Gatsby over. This is the love Gatsby cannot give Daisy because he’s too busy extracting and imposing; it’s the love of being seen. This is close reading at its best. On a surface read we can get the obsession Gatsby has with Daisy, but we will never understand — or at least be able to explain — the curiosity of Nick’s presence and the depth of his desire to believe in something bigger, more “romantic” than himself, a belief that compels him to return to this man’s story over and over again. Gatsby itself becomes a text about returning: Gatsby to Daisy, Nick to Gatsby, us (at least those shaped by the American high school system) to the novel.
Many critics of close reading pride themselves on reading more books because they privilege the narrative, without pausing to analyze or over-read; they return to books because they love the character or the plot or the vibe. But close reading is just applying the obsession we have with plot and character to language itself, and returning to the words — the building blocks of the other parts — with the same attention as the first time. It’s treating the language itself like a room worth returning to, or a person who we love but can’t quite figure out.
YEAR THREE: LANGUAGE
In my third year, I keep running out of time in class. Maybe I’ve grown more verbose, or maybe my students this year have more to say. Sometimes they talk without any interjection from me. Sometimes at the end of class we don’t get to the page I wanted to direct us to, and so we simply read a paragraph or sentence out loud together. For instance, the famous last lines:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning — —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
If there were a few more minutes, I’d like for them to notice the way that the tense changes from past to present to past to future to present, cycling through tenses in a way that mimics the sentiment of the phrase: that to move forward inevitably involves facing one’s past; that to move on in time is also to be “borne” back, as if moving toward death is also moving toward your original context; the past and the present and future all interlinked more circularly than linearly.
Sometimes we get to all this. Sometimes we just read the lines together three times over.
The project at the end of the Gatsby unit involves students choosing one sentence to close read, and to make a case for it as the “best sentence in the book.” It begs for the kind of over-reading that Kanakia and Horn (of the Atlantic) hate. Sometimes students say cool, original stuff; sometimes they regurgitate ideas from the internet; some draw elaborate diagrams that make no sense, or partial sense; sometimes they merely read the sentence over and over, stressing different phrases as if mere emphasis reveals deeper meaning.
Regardless of the output, the task quietly underlying the assignment is that — for this one week — the students become deeply familiar with one sentence, come to know its every cadence, comma, shape, and sound. Who is to say how many will come away with a revelation or original analysis. But when the diagrams fade, it’s true that they have been forced into intimacy with the language. It’s possible that more than meaning, the words themselves will be floating in their heads, echoing . . . . And maybe one fine day, they’ll come back, curious about that strange elongated jangle rattling in their brains. Maybe built into their sentence is a feeling compelling enough to move them back to the text. And maybe that’s where they’ll find something new.
Learning to close read is a spiritual endeavor: it’s surrendering to the possibility of finding nothing, of not knowing, of looking dumb. To close read is to say I may not find what I’m looking for here, and I may not find anything at all, and yet I will continue to look. Which is why I return to Gatsby or to many beloved texts, to a single sentence, symbol, or word; but also why I return to my friends, to my girlfriend, to my family every summer, to anything at all, because to know something is to look carefully at it again, and again. This isn’t a feeling you arrive at through reading a lot, quickly. It’s what you arrive at after boredom, after recognition, after going through familiar patterns, after diving in and coming up empty-handed. It’s what you gain from deciding to return. It’s learning to come back with infinite hope and a romantic readiness to believe that what was once plain might twist slightly, unfolded strangely and wonderfully. Some might find this belief obsessive, even unnecessary. But I think it looks a lot like love.
Emma Heath is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn. She’s a Contributing Writer for the Cleveland Review of Books; she writes essays, reviews, and some other stuff too. Follow her on X @emmabheath.