I fully blame my 16-year-old self.

That was the first time I read “The Great Gatsby,” and when I formed in my mind the picture of what Gatsby looked like.  Unfortunately, with a new movie version coming out, that vision doesn’t match who was cast in that role.

So when I re-read the book, I tried to force myself to see Gatsby as Leonardo DiCaprio, but a few pages later I would be right back to imagining him more like Jon Hamm.  Of course I haven’t seen the movie yet, but if it happens that way, I will feel vindicated.

I don’t want to get into an extensive breakdown of this one (if you want that, I can print a high school paper for you), but there are a few things that stood out.

The first is my apparent word of the year (in slightly different forms).  Narrator Nick Carraway is describing a lunch meeting with Gatsby and his associate Mr. Wolfsheim, and uses a not-so-common word that has cropped up in my other reading this year:

“Mr. Wolfsheim swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.”

Hopefully sleep-walking isn’t an actual theme in my daily life, though since I work overnights for half the week, that may be an accurate description at times.

For a book that has pervasive themes of the basic way people treat each other — often badly, and for pure personal gain — it does have several instances of a more macro, selfless view.

In fact, right at the start, Carraway describes advice given to him by his father:

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

Word.  Unless those people are on a reality show.  That’s what they’re there for.

Carraway continues the same theme later, though after this instance admits that his “tolerance” has a limit:

“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.  I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”

And then there’s this from Gatsby (talking about Daisy), about the way we sometimes see others a certain way because of our own attributes:

“She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her…”

As someone who has been described by others as smart, but has a blog with a label “not smart,” I very much love this quote.

I’ll close with another theme of the story — the personal search each of the characters has in finding out what drives them and matters in their life.  Carraway narrates about Daisy and the indecision she faces in light of the men in her life:

“And all the time something within her was crying for a decision.  She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand.”

Fitzgerald knows life isn’t that easy, and forces his characters to make their own lives.  I’m excited to see how that plays out on the big screen.