•In order to fully understand the

significance of the novel, it is

important that we gain an
appreciation of the historical
background of the novel.

•Perhaps the most important

thing that we need to consider
is how this novel fits within the
context of ‘The American
Dream’
•It is easy to forget that America is in
many ways a country in its infancy.
The Declaration of Independence
was signed in 1776 and it contained
an idealised belief that America would
be a land of equals.
•At its heart, the idealised vision of the
American dream is the belief in the
concept of a ‘meritocracy’, a
structure of society in which the
hard working reach their goals. It is
a system that values hard work and
aspiration above all else.
•One of the founding fathers in
particular, Thomas Jefferson,
believed that America should be a
land of opportunity. There was a
sense of limitless possibility across
this vast new continent. It was in every
way a brave new world.

•As a character, Gatsby in many

ways embodies this spirit of
opportunity. He is not held back by his
background in the pursuit of his goals.
•The opening Chapter introduces us to
the narrator, Nick Carraway. The events
of the Chapter see Nick visit his cousin
Daisy Buchanan and her husband
Tom.

•Tom and Daisy live across Long Island

Sound in the more fashionable ‘East
Egg’. Nick has recently moved into a
small rented house in the less
fashionable neighbourhood of ‘West
Egg’.

•The Chapter serves as an introduction

•Nick is presented as both the narrator
of and a character within the story.

•Nick has come to West Egg having

relocated to the East Coast of America.
He is a bond salesman, however he is
clearly from a wealthy background.

•Nick’s narration is a little self

conscious. He appears frustrated by the
Buchanans and by the failure of those
around him. He declares that Gatsby
had an ‘extraordinary’ gift for hope.
•Daisy will ultimately be unveiled as the
object of Gatsby’s affection. Love of her is
his driving motivation, yet from the
outset, Nick makes it clear that Daisy is a
figure who is fundamentally unworthy of
his affection.

•Daisy’s name implies her delicacy, yet

our first interaction with her highlights a
falseness about her actions.

•There is a crushing emptiness about her

life.
•Tom Buchanan is an old university
acquaintance of Nick’s. He is vastly
wealthy and represents the upper class of
American society.

•Tom’s affair and the carelessness of it is

a theme to be repeated throughout the
novel, while his racist views highlight a
growing unease at the heart of America-
and highlight the clear inequality of this
great nation of equals.
•Chapter 2 sees Nick and Tom make
their way to New York where they meet
with Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson.

•Myrtle lives in the ‘Valley of Ashes’

between West Egg and the city itself.

•Myrtle is married to a motor mechanic

by the name of George Wilson.

•In New York, Nick attends a party that

is held in the apartment that Tom has
rented for Myrtle.
The party includes Myrtle’s sister
atherine as well as some of their
eighbours.

During a heated exchange about his

marriage, Tom breaks Myrtle’s nose.
•Myrtle Wilson is Tom Buchanan’s
mistress, and she is everything that
Daisy is not. Where Daisy appears
intentionally vacuous, Myrtle clearly
has a mind and voice of her own and
she is not afraid to use it.

•Myrtle lives in the desolate valley of

ashes and sees her liaison with Tom as
being her only means of escape. Tom
provides her with the lifestyle that she
aspires to…even although she is fully
aware that he is married.
•Myrtle’s behaviour in this chapter is
symbolic of the rise in consumer culture
that came to symbolise the period
known as ‘The Roaring 20s’.

•In the chapter we see Myrtle purchase

numerous items, however each of these
are proof that for Tom, she too is
property to be bought and paid for. His
relationship with her is a material
commitment rather than an emotional
one.
•Perhaps one of the most powerful symbols in the novel are
the ‘Eyes of Doctor TJ Eckleberg’.

•These eyes are part of an advertising hoarding in the

valley of ashes. They advertise the local practice of an
optician, and add further symbolic significance to the
importance of consumer culture during this period.

•The eyes also come to symbolise God…and indicate how

the values of this American society has changed.
•The Valley of Ashes as a location is perhaps the most
powerful symbol of the failed ideals of the American
Dream. While America held a hope that it would become a
society of equals…the great valley of ashes proves that this
is not the case and that clear divisions in class and
opportunity really do exist.
•Nick is invited to one of his mysterious
neighbour’s party. Here he meets
Jordan Baker once again, and together
they describe the grandeur of the
parties.

•Nick listens with interest as the various

guests at the party discuss the
mysterious origins of their host. Some
suggest that he is a cousin of the
German Kaiser, while others suggest
that he has killed a man once.
•Nick finally meets Gatsby and it is clear
that he is immediately won over by his
charm. His description of their first
encounter highlights many of the
positive qualities of the character which
we will see later in the novel, while also
introducing us to some of his more
obvious failings.

•The evening ends with Jordan

explaining that she has just heard
something remarkable from Gatsby
that she cannot reveal to Nick.
•Gatsby’s party brings the wealth and glamour
of the period to the forefront of the novel.

•Fitzgerald highlights the divide between the

new rich and the established order in his
description of these riotous parties where the
morals appear far looser than at any time in
history.

•The newly wealthy are seen to lack the

refinement expected, while the established
classes make the trip across the sound to
West Egg with an almost voyeuristic
enthusiasm.
•In this scenario, Gatsby is again an enigma—
though he lives in a garishly ostentatious West Egg
mansion, East Eggers freely attend his parties.
Despite the tensions between the two groups, the
blend of East and West Egg creates a distinctly
American mood. While the Americans at the party
possess a rough vitality, the Englishmen there are
set off dramatically, seeming desperate and
predatory, hoping to make connections that will
make them rich.

•Fitzgerald has delayed the introduction of the

novel’s most important figure—Gatsby himself—until
the beginning of Chapter 3. The reader has seen
Gatsby from a distance, heard other characters talk
about him, and listened to Nick’s thoughts about
him, but has not actually met him (nor has Nick).
. Fitzgerald gives Gatsby a suitably grand
entrance as the aloof host of a spectacularly
decadent party. Despite this introduction, this
chapter continues to heighten the sense of
mystery and enigma that surrounds Gatsby,
as the low profile he maintains seems curiously
out of place with his lavish expenditures.

In his first direct contact with Gatsby, Nick

notices his extraordinary smile—“one of those
rare smiles with a quality of eternal
reassurance in it.” Nick’s impression of
Gatsby emphasizes his optimism and vitality—
something about him seems remarkably
hopeful, and this belief in the brilliance of the
future impresses Nick, even before he knows
what future Gatsby envisions.
He hold vast parties yet appears to know none
of his guests.

His accent appears to be somewhat affected.

He calls people “old sport”, which is an oddly
antiquitated form of speech.

There are other examples of this apparent

falseness in the conduct of Gatsby. Owl Eyes,
the man bizarely occupying the library is
astonished to discover that the books ‘are real’.

From this chapter forward, the mystery of Jay

Gatsby becomes the motivating question of the
book, and the unraveling of Gatsby’s character
becomes one of its central mechanisms
•Gatsby visits Nick’s house for
the first time, and talks of his
wartime experience.
•They travel into the city, where
Gatsby introduces Nick to Meyer
Wolfsheim.
•Later, Jordan tells Nick about
Daisy’s past, her brief love affair
with Gatsby, and her subsequent
marriage to Tom.
Gatsby’s possessions do not make him
happy. He seems to get no intrinsic
pleasure from the collected artefacts
around him and seems self-consciously
aware of the pretence upon which he has
built his public persona. As such he
‘chokes’ on his lie to Nick that he was
educated at Oxford and seems burdened
by an intense energy: ‘he was never
quite still; there was always a tapping
foot somewhere or the impatient
opening and closing of a hand’. He
seems to be aware that he could be
exposed at any time – unlike the
complacent Tom, who revels luxuriously
in the splendour of his castle, Gatsby
seems never to be at rest with himself.
At this point, Nick re-tells the story of
Gatsby and Daisy’s love affair from
Jordan’s point of view. He relates her
words as if they were exactly as he
remembers them of the October in 1917.

•Does this effect the reliability of Nick’s

narrative style?
•Can Jordan be trusted to tell the truth?
Jordan tells how Daisy had been the ‘most
popular girl’ in their Louisville hometown
when they were growing up. The colour white
is mentioned in connection to her three times,
thus establishing her as the archetypal fairy-
virgin whose parents don’t approve of the
relationship she has formed with a young
soldier (Gatsby) and force her to finish with
him.
She is shown to get over this disappointment
quickly by becoming engaged to Tom
Buchanan the next February, Jordan, her
bridesmaid, tells of how she discovered Daisy
drunk on her bed on the day of her wedding
breakfast, clutching a letter in her hand (from
Gatsby) and crying uncontrollably.
Daisy, through choice, has become an emblem
of Tom’s old money. She abandons her
romantic urges, casts off her emotional coat and
embarks on a marriage which will offer stability
of status. Note the effort of the others to ‘ice’
her into submission, cooling her truer passion
for the man she loved, and they way they ‘hook’
her into her dress. For she has, indeed, become
a piece of meat in this transaction. This is borne
out in Jordan’s recollection of how Tom began
cheating on her almost immediately after the
wedding was over, as well as his love of
alcohol.

Jordan then informs Nick that Gatsby's ‘favour’

is to ask him to invite Daisy round to his house
for tea, in an attempt to rekindle an affair that
had been extinguished by ice and snow years
earlier.
•Nick organises a meeting at his house
between Gatsby and Daisy
•Alone with Nick, Gatsby discloses that
the money which bought his mansion
was made in just three years
•Gatsby gives them a guided tour of
his house, displaying his possessions,
especially his expensive, imported
clothes
•Nick muses on the nature of Gatsby's
desire for this woman, and remarks on
the intensity of their relationship,
eventually he leaves them alone
•Perhaps he wishes his house to be a
beacon of light to Daisy, in the same way that
her green dock light is a source of spiritual
satisfaction to him.
•He seems like a man who is afraid of the
dark – or of the ghostliness that comes from
an empty house.
•For Gatsby, the ‘show’ of his home must go
on to face off the darkness troubling him.
•His life is essentially empty – notice how he
talks about ‘glancing into some of the
rooms’ in his house, as if checking to see
that everything is ‘perfect’.
•His home is a showpiece, an emblem of
spiritual death.
The episode in which Gatsby and Daisy
are reunited in his mansion is clearly a
highly significant one. It is an encounter
that carries an enormous amount of
weight in the novel and, discloses to us
that Daisy falls terribly short of the ideal
version lodged in Gatsby's heart and
imagination.

It might seem obvious that Gatsby and

Daisy have a lot of catching up to do,
and would feel the need to talk at length,
yet dialogue is kept to a minimum.
Their feelings for one and other are
communicated through their actions and
through what remains unsaid.
As Gatsby falls into an anti-
climax, Daisy begins to cry.
The introduction of the
symbol of Gatsby’s shirts is
very important here. Daisy
breaks down at the sight of
Gatsby throwing – almost
obsessively – his shirts onto
his bed.
 He took out a pile of shirts and began
throwing them, one by one, before us,
shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine
flannel, which lost their folds as they fell
and covered the table in a many-coloured
disarray. While we admired he brought
more and the soft rich heap mounted
higher – shirts with stripes and scrolls and
plaids in coral and apple-green and
lavender and faint orange, with
monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with
a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into
the shirts and began to cry stormily.
Daisy’s moment of release – when the ‘soft
rich heap’ dumbfounds her – occurs at a
moment of simultaneous wonder and
disappointment. Gatsby is, by now, ‘running
down like an over wound clock’, a result of
having spent so many years obsessing over
Daisy ‘at an inconceivable pitch of
intensity’. His rather bewildered sense of
sadness and anti-climax combines with
Daisy’s sense of wonder and awe at the
spectacle of social status laid out before her.
Like the time she was dog-chained by Tom's
status symbol (the pearls) she reacts to
Gatsby's shirts with tears. The curious mixture
of happiness and tears (sunshine and rain)
provides a rainbow – depicted by the
multicoloured array of shirts on the bed.
Daisy’s moment of release – when the ‘soft
rich heap’ dumbfounds her – occurs at a
moment of simultaneous wonder and
disappointment. Gatsby is, by now, ‘running
down like an over wound clock’, a result of
having spent so many years obsessing over
Daisy ‘at an inconceivable pitch of
intensity’. His rather bewildered sense of
sadness and anti-climax combines with
Daisy’s sense of wonder and awe at the
spectacle of social status laid out before her.
Like the time she was dog-chained by Tom's
status symbol (the pearls) she reacts to
Gatsby's shirts with tears. The curious mixture
of happiness and tears (sunshine and rain)
provides a rainbow – depicted by the
multicoloured array of shirts on the bed.
We get the feeling in this chapter that,
despite Gatsby’s sense of wonder and
awe at Daisy's presence, he nonetheless
experiences an unusual sense of
emptiness and disappointment.

Nick makes particular reference to the

light at the end of Daisy's dock, the
‘colossal significance’, of which, ‘has
now vanished forever’.

For Gatsby, that light had been a

tantalising, spiritual beacon to light his way
to Daisy, now that he is within his grasp, it
has reverted back to the ordinary.
 Gatsby seems to revel in the electric intensity of reaching for an
object more than grasping it:

I saw that the faint expression of bewilderment had come back into
Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to
the quality of his present happiness. Five years! There just have
been moments even on that afternoon when Daisy stumbled short
of his dreams – not through her fault, but because of the colossal
vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.
…No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can
store up in his ghostly heart.

The trajectory of Gatsby's dream is such that the object of that

dream – Daisy – falls short. This is part of Gatsby's tragedy –
pursuing a dream that he, himself, has made unattainable.
Nick reveals more about
Gatsby’s past , his humble
origins and his time with Dan
Cody.

The Buchanans attend one

of Gatsby's parties and the
tensions between Tom and
the host grow more obvious.
Gatsby finally achieves his goal
of getting Daisy to one of his
party only to see that she is not
impressed, but disgusted at the
lavishness and vulgarity of it.

In pairs, find as many quotes as

you can which build up a picture
of Daisy’s feelings towards the
party and how Gatsby reacts to
this.
 Daisy does not enjoy the spectacle of the party. The
orchestra, the mounds of food, the champagne, the dancing,
the drunkenness all disgust her:
She was appalled by West Egg, the unprecedented
‘place’… appalled by its raw vigour that chafed under the
old euphemisms… and by the fate that herded its
inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing.
She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed
to understand.
Gatsby detects her disapproval and has difficulty concealing
his own disappointment. The theatre of spectacle and
indulgence has been for nothing. The show will soon be over.
 Daisy does not enjoy the spectacle of the party. The
orchestra, the mounds of food, the champagne, the dancing,
the drunkenness all disgust her:
She was appalled by West Egg, the unprecedented
‘place’… appalled by its raw vigour that chafed under the
old euphemisms… and by the fate that herded its
inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing.
She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed
to understand.
Gatsby detects her disapproval and has difficulty concealing
his own disappointment. The theatre of spectacle and
indulgence has been for nothing. The show will soon be over.
•Nick and Gatsby visit the Buchanans’, where
Jordan is also a guest, and meet Daisy’s daughter.
•En route to the city, the group stops at George
Wilson’s garage, and Wilson discloses that he and
his wife are planning to go West.
•The group takes a room at the Plaza Hotel, where
Tom and Gatsby argue about which of them Daisy
loves.
•Myrtle Wilson is killed by a hit-and-run driver.
•Gatsby reveals to Nick that Daisy was driving the
vehicle, but announces his intention to take the
blame.
The events in this chapter lead us inexorably to the
tragic ending. The party is well and truly over. As
Gatsby becomes firmly embroiled in his affair with
Daisy proper, he rejects the materialism and
conspicuous consumption that defines the era.
Everything now is invested and dedicated to the
fulfilment of his dream – Daisy.
• Gatsby is no longer throwing theatrical
parties on his lawn. ‘The whole
caravansary has fallen in like a card
house at the disapproval in [Daisy’s]
eyes’. In addition, he has sacked
significant numbers of his huge staff in
order to prevent gossip about him. He is
more cautious about his image now that
he and Daisy are ‘back together’.

• This indicates how – for Gatsby – money

in itself means nothing, he doesn’t enjoy
the trappings of wealth (remember how
he behaves at his parties). Everything is
dedicated to the quest beyond money –
Daisy, his dream.
Jordan
 She cheats, therefore taking the short cut to
success, which is a false interpretation of the
dream. Cheating is a short-cut to success. It
needn’t be earned – its taken.

Daisy
 Cannot progress as a mother because she is
too self obsessed. She is unable to make
decisions in her own life, never mind help
raise a child and be a good role model.
 Essentially, they are both aimless and
whimsical without any real direction or
purpose to their lives. Both women are lazy
and turn each decision about their lives into a
whim. The decision, therefore to head to the
city is itself a tragic one, since it is borne out
of sheer boredom.
• This relationship is especially
revealing since it highlights just how
artificial and insincere Daisy is as a
mother. She is merely playing the
part but is utterly unconvincing and
false.

• Pammy is no more than a toy,

paraded out in front of guests to be
looked at and admired. Oddly she has
“old yellow hair”, the colour of decay
and is prematurely aged.

• Daisy’s inability to love her own child

is a crucial flaw in her character – is
she really capable of experiencing real
love for anyone other than herself?
• “Mr Nobody from nowhere”

• This is in many ways Tom’s most

devastating line. Here he reminds
Gatsby of his place in the social
hierarchy.

• He may well have the house and the

wealth but he will always lack the
social status required to truly be a
match for Tom Buchanan.
 Nevertheless, for the first time we
glimpse a real and genuine sense of
affection between the two in the hotel
room, when Daisy admits “even alone
I can’t say I never loved Tom.” The
listing of significant shared events over
the last 5 years together emphasises
this intimacy which is again witnessed
after the accident when they are seen
conspiring together about the
accident. In the end, when events
spiral out of control, she retreats to
the comfort and security of the old-
money life. It is of course deeply
ironic, that as she and Tom plot
against him, Gatsby is protectively
watching over her.
 Nevertheless, for the first time we
glimpse a real and genuine sense of
affection between the two in the hotel
room, when Daisy admits “even alone
I can’t say I never loved Tom.” The
listing of significant shared events over
the last 5 years together emphasises
this intimacy which is again witnessed
after the accident when they are seen
conspiring together about the
accident. In the end, when events
spiral out of control, she retreats to
the comfort and security of the old-
money life. It is of course deeply
ironic, that as she and Tom plot
against him, Gatsby is protectively
watching over her.
• That she dies reaching out for the very
thing she feared the most , Daisy, is
especially revealing, as is the description
of the accident. She is left kneeling, in an
almost reverent pose while her “thick,
dark blood” is reminiscent of her robust
sexuality, vitality and passion. Even in her
death her sexuality is exposed and made
public: her “left breast…swinging loose
like a flap” is an almost grotesque and
gratuitous image, emphasising that she
has been consumed and used up.
• Both Tom and Daisy have been
instrumental in her death (she believed
Tom was in the car and daisy killed her).
Daisy doesn’t even stop to mop up the
mess she has made.
• When Nick leaves the
Buchanans’ house, he notices
Gatsby standing there in his
pink suit. He is determined to
keep watch over Daisy, in the
improbable hope that he can
protect her from Tom’s anger.
• Right to the end, he casts
himself as her hero prince, and
she as the trapped princess in
her castle fortress,
• Gatsby informs Nick that he
intends to take the blame for
Daisy’s mistake, thus casting
himself in a ‘martyred’ role that
will be more fully developed in
the next chapter.
• Daisy and Tom are obviously discussing how to
frame Gatsby. It is therefore poignant and ironic
that Gatsby keeps watch over Daisy until dawn –
‘watching over nothing’. Far from being a
romantic, like George, or an idealist like Gatsby.
Daisy is a pragmatist like her husband. They are
actually very well suited to each other. She
abandons all notions of Gatsby when details of
his business practises are aired, and retreats
into the solid, comfortable world of ‘old money’ in
the wake of the accident.
• Gatsby’s refusal to accept Daisy's
betrayal and the fact that he sticks with
her to the bitter end is an indication of his
idealism, his dedication to the dream.
Even when faced with the certainty that
she is lost to him, Gatsby refuses to
relinquish the dream. He is a purist
and idealist. He will never settle. It is
this which is both his most admirable
quality and his downfall. This is a
common theme in American literature –
the anti –hero – someone, who despite
his flaws is ultimately elevated to heroic
status.
Gatsby is in constant turmoil yet
paradoxically the turmoil inspires him.
He is only content when aspiring for
something. Once he has it within his
grasp it is rendered worthless so he
changes the dream to suit.
• For example, at first he craved Daisy, when he couldn’t
have her he amended his dream to include financial
success as a means to attract her. When finally he has
Daisy in his reach he changes it again, trying to hold
onto the voice which is of course unattainable. The
logical conclusion to Gatsby’s dream therefore will
always be failure BUT although the dream is an
illusion, it is nevertheless worth aspiring to
• In this way, Gatsby’s life – and death – represents the
American Dream itself. It is a dream devoted to spiritual
values, but once it is realised, it becomes corrupt.
• Gatsby’s funeral takes
place, with his father one of
the very few mourners
present.
• Henry Gatz speaks with
pride of his son’s
attainment.
• Later, Nick contemplates
the empty mansion and
ponders the significance of
Gatsby’s story.
It is fitting that barely anyone attends the funeral. In death,
as in life, Gatsby is isolated. This serves to highlight his
unique capacity for hope, which sets him apart from
the other characters. It is not until this chapter that the
reader truly feels the profound loss of Gatsby, a character
who is simultaneously both noble and corrupt.
Fitzgerald makes us questions our own perceptions of a
hero: Gatsby should not be a hero, yet he is. Despite his
desperate attempts to be accepted into this repugnant
social clique, he is abandoned by all who knew him and
supposedly cared for him – most notably Daisy and
Wolfsheim. Also, Gatsby’s is ultimately sacrificed, just like
Jesus, to reveal an important truth – that the dream is
corrupt but the aspiration of it is noble and
worthwhile.
• The irony of Nick organising the funeral is that he has only
known Gatsby for three months. The people who
supposedly knew and loved him – Daisy, Meyer Wolfsheim
and Klipspringer – all disappear. Nick says ‘I wanted to
get someone for him’. He feels – like we do – that Gatsby
was a man terrified of being alone.
• He imagines Gatsby's corpse speaking to him: ‘Look here,
old sport, you’ve got to get someone for me. You've
got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone’.
• A further irony is that Owl Eyes is the only person from the
partygoers who attend his funeral – a man of no vision and
no capacity for understanding. Only the blindest partygoers
saw Gatsby's truth.
• This episode reinforces the idea of Nick’s solidity and lack
of judgement. Despite Gatsby's obvious faults, he admires
and respects his capacity for hope.
A solemn old man, very helpless and dismayed,
bundled up in a long cheap Ulster… his eyes
leaked continuously… the glass of milk spilled
from his trembling hand… his eyes, seeing
nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room…
they leaked isolated and unpunctual tears.

There is a chaotic sense of disorder in his

movement and appearance. Unlike Gatsby, who
can remain cool on a blisteringly hot day, he
continually reacts to his environment. He ‘sees
nothing’ and so is contrasted with his son's ability
to dream visions.
He holds out a picture of
Gatsby's house for Nick to
see. Nick comments:
He had shown it so often that
I think it was more real to him
now than the house itself.
In this way, the house is
reminiscent of the green light
at the end of Daisy’s dock,
which was more truly
representative of Gatsby's
love for Daisy than Daisy
herself.
The arrival of Gatsby’s father
only serves to remind us of
the enormous scope and
scale of Gatsby’s journey
and transformation. He
could not be more different,
both physically and in his
character for his father and
we can empathise a little
more perhaps with Gatsby’s
assertion that “his
imagination had never
really accepted them as his
parents at all.”
 Nick’s decision to return to "my
middle west” – the mid-west of
small town America - the
pulsating heartland of the new
world – a place of picket
fences, apple pie and
wholesomeness only serves to
contrast with the cruel, cold,
calculating heartlessness of the
East coast. Nick is repulsed by
his experiences and it is only
from returning home that he
can hope to make sense of the
events of the summer.
• The rubbing away of the profanity at Gatsby’s house is a literal
attempt to clear Gatsby’s name, while the book fulfils the
same function on a larger, metaphorical scale.
• The entire novel, in fact, is a reflective tribute to his three-
month friend, a man he admired despite his faults, and despite
the vicious gossip of his contemporaries.
• As he leaves, Nick reflects on the ‘huge incoherent failure’ of
Gatsby's house, a description which could be equally applied
to Gatsby himself. The incoherence and failures of Gatsby,
however, do not undermine his positive qualities – his idealism,
his capacity to hope and dream, his gift for self-invention and
his instinctive sense of nobility.
• His assertion that this “is a story of the West after all” shows
a level of self awareness and honestly not displayed by any
other character. Indeed, Nick is the only character in the novel
who is able to reflect and change because of his experiences.
This is the part of the novel
where most readers shed a
wee tear! We are left
shocked and saddened by
Gatsby’s death, and feel
anger at the ironic
misconceptions and
manipulations behind the
scenes that led to his violent
and unjustified murder. But
it is perhaps true to say that,
until the end, we don’t
exactly feel the loss of
Gatsby himself.
It’s only when we see Gatsby's place in the context
of our world that we can see his life and death
as having tragic consequences. Gatsby may be
dead but in the final paragraphs, the climax of
the novel sums up poetically and profoundly the
impact of his life. Gatsby’s struggle, is the
struggle of all humanity and Nick again alludes
to the original pioneers on first glimpse of the
New World. At the end of the novel, Nick subtly
summarises Gatsby's place in the failure of the
American Dream:
…as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses
began to melt away until gradually I became
aware of the old island that flowered once for
Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the
new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had
made way for Gatsby's house, had once
pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of
all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted
moment man must have held his breath in the
presence of this continent, compelled into an
aesthetic contemplation he neither understood
nor desired, face to face for the last time in
history with something commensurate to his
capacity to wonder.
Why did Gatsby fail to grasp his dream? There are several
reasons:

His dream wasn’t worth grasping – Daisy did not love him in
the real sense of the word. Her pragmatism at key moments
undermined Gatsby's truer love. It was clear from the start
that she would make a solid connection with old money, and
do anything to ensure the stability of her marriage.

His dream was impossible – it was not there for the taking.
Like the Dutch settlers’ view of the old New York, it was a
vision of promise that could never be realised. Just as
Gatsby looks to Daisy as a symbol of the repeated past and
cannot accept the consequences of her present life, the
early settlers’ in America would not have been able to
predict the catastrophic changes to American values in
further centuries.
The American Dream became corrupt the
moment it was realised. The pure,
untouched beauty of that original vision
disappeared and made way for
consumerism, industrial development,
power struggles and class systems. The
original dream was destroyed by its future.
Gatsby’s dream only exists as a figment of the past –
he craves the idea of re-living the events of his first
summer with Daisy, over and over again, constantly
denying to himself and others the inevitability and
consequences of Time. He and Daisy only exist in the
past. As such, Nick observes:

He did not know that [the dream] was already behind

him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity of the
city.

Gatsby's dream has been left behind in time, in the mid-

west. This is why he realised that he had lost the ‘old
warm world’ just as he died.
So Gatsby is the man we should admire and cheer for. In
a world with no dreams left to dream, he carries on
believing in the future. He may be a deluded fool, but at
least he risks everything for the promise of fulfilment.
The reader is left with a poignant picture of Gatsby
battling against the current of Time, searching out his
hopeless dream in the last famous lines of the novel. We
feel a tremendous sense for empathy for Gatsby, as Nick
describes how we all run along with him. We instinctively
feel that the world needs a man like this, those who are
unafraid to reach for dreams that are essentially beyond
them:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the
orgiastic 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.