#Nick of great gatsby full
#Nick of great gatsby license

If the race of an American character is not specified, we assume the character is white. Rarely do we question the racial identities of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characters, or Herman Melville’s, or Willa Cather’s. In America, we are taught that canonical literature foregrounds the experiences of white people. Read: To its earliest reviewers, Gatsby was anything but great I was a 20-year-old English major, concentrating in African American literature at a historically Black college, and I still needed that permission.

#Nick of great gatsby license

In it, Carlyle Van Thompson, a professor of African American and American literature at Medgar Evers College, argues that Fitzgerald “guilefully characterizes Jay Gatsby as a ‘pale’ Black individual who passes for white.” I read this sentence twice, feeling like I had finally been granted license to enter the novel, to see myself in it, to make my way through the prose and develop my own interpretations. I turned to the secondary literature and found a chapter that offered an unexpected perspective on Gatsby’s race in a 2004 book titled The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination. If I hoped to pass my upper-level literature course, I needed to find a way in. (One of my high-school teachers read Roots aloud to us for 45 minutes each class period-we made it through all 888 pages.) Stymied by the structure and language of Gatsby, I couldn’t get a handle on the characters either. Like my students, I hadn’t been prepared by my public education for such a text.

#Nick of great gatsby full

Fitzgerald’s coupling of lyrical passages with a minimalist plot, full of fits and starts, proved too great a challenge for me. I, too, had struggled with Gatsby when I first read the book-and I had been a junior in college. More advanced readings, I realized, would have to be tabled. Eventually, one brave soul would raise a hand. “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. Any appeal I made to the sheer pleasures of the text fell flat. 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. I succeeded, only to be deflated: My students fought Gatsby from the beginning. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.