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Green Light Illusion
Laekin Dunoskovic
Professor Olson
English 303
11th December, 2013
Revised for ENG 489, Summer 2014
Professor Katharine Whitcomb
In Bobbie Ann Mason’s short story “Shiloh,” Leroy desperately grasps for the past in pursuance
of reawakening his once thriving relationship with his wife, Norma Jean. Jay Gatsby, from F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, shows the same desperation by trying to rekindle his relationship and his
past with Daisy Buchanan. First, both men try to focus on the past, believing that it would heal old
wounds instead trying to keep their relationships progressive. Then both Leroy and Jay feel
emasculated in their relationships, Jay from financial stress and Leroy from the inability to support his
family, and they both try to keep their masculinity in different ways. Leroy wants to build a cabin, while
Jay disappears for five years in order to find a way to provide for the love of his life. Finally, both Leroy
and Jay delude themselves before their respective incidents, and neither come back to reality until the
relationships have been bent, stretched, twisted, tried, and then finally broken.
Both men strive to start from where their relationship previously left off before their incidents
occur, but it does not work as well for the women. At the beginning of Bobbie Ann Mason’s story, Leroy
had been in a severe car accident disabling him from his work: driving a large truck. Mason mentions
later on that Leroy and Norma Jean had gotten married when she had become pregnant, but the baby
had died at a few months old. In the story, Leroy tries to fix his relationship with his wife by visiting
Shiloh and Shiloh’s past. Jay Gatsby’s fervor for Daisy causes him to pursue the small green light at the
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end of her dock from across the bay. They had loved each other once before, and he still loved her even
then. After Daisy becomes his, Jay still follows the green light at the end of the dock since it symbolizes
everything they had once had with one another: “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 – to-morrow we will run
faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . –– So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald, 182). Both men are “borne back ceaselessly into the past” where
they feel they can repair their future. Both stories show that when one reaches into the past, the hope
for the future recedes.
Leroy and Norma Jean’s relationship starts off strongly after Leroy is in a bad accident on the
freeway. When Leroy decides to stay at home after he is fully healed, their relationship is strained.
When Leroy would drive trucks across the country, he would occasionally pick up a hitchhiker or two.
During the drive he would sometimes talk about his life with them. He starts to realize how strained
their relationship is when he “has the sudden impulse to tell Norma Jean about himself, as if he had just
met her. They had known each other so long they have forgotten a lot about each other. They could
become reacquainted” (Gwynn, 320), but he ignores this impulse.
Leroy’s mother-in-law, Mabel, urges him to take Norma Jean to Shiloh in hope that it might
repair something in their relationship. The significance of Shiloh to Mabel is that she went there on her
honeymoon and she feels that Leroy and Norma Jean desperately need a second honeymoon – much
like her first one. Norma Jean is more living in the present and she loses her patience when her husband
tries to force her back into the past. With Leroy always at home now, he feels like there’s something
missing because Norma Jean and him never talked about the baby after it happened: “They never speak
about their memories of Randy, which have almost faded, but now that Leroy is home all the time, they
sometimes feel awkward around each other, and Leroy wonders if one of them should mention the
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child” (Gwynn, 314). After Mabel broaches the subject of a young child dying from parental neglect,
Norma Jean feels as though her mother was trying to attack her for smoking by alluding to a child’s
death: “Later she says to Leroy, ‘She just said that about the baby because she caught me smoking. She’s
trying to pay me back. . . .The very idea, her bringing up a subject like that! Saying it was neglect!”
(Gwynn, 320-321). Leroy had always wanted to talk to Norma Jean about the incident, but the way she
reacts makes him decide that they cannot discuss this subject without either of them reliving the hurt as
if it had just happened. In “Shiloh”, Mason implies that Leroy feels that if they had talked about the
baby when it had first happened, the relationship might still be intact and progressive. Mabel and Leroy
want to recount the situation in order to bring around healing, while Norma Jean wishes to forget it ever
happened since she has already moved on – on her own.
The same way, Jay urges Daisy to forget the present and everything that had separated them for
five years in order to pick up where they had left off: “It doesn’t matter anymore. Just tell him the truth
– that you never loved him – and it’s all wiped out forever” (Fitzgerald, 132). This does not work well
because Daisy did once love Tom and she has a child with him. Jay has unintentionally (arguably)
strained his relationship with Daisy by forcing an ultimatum upon her. She cannot merely forget her
husband and leave him as Jay desires. Daisy’s reluctance sends Jay into frenzy, but Daisy is unable to
give him what he wants: “Oh you want too much! . . . I love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help
what’s past. . . . I did love him once – but I loved you too” (Fitzgerald, 133). When she refuses to choose
the past over the present, Daisy, with the assistance of her husband, refuses also to engage into the
relationship with Jay any further.
In Shiloh, Leroy tries urgently to regain his masculinity after the accident. He can no longer drive
long distances without immense pain, so he loses his job. Without a job, Leroy cannot provide for
Norma Jean as he wishes he can. Instead he talks about building her a log cabin as a way to support his
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wife: “Ever since they were married, he has promised Norma Jean he would build her a new home one
day. They have always rented, and the house they live in is small and nondescript. It does not even feel
like a home, Leroy realizes now” (Gwynn, 313-314). After the accident the most Leroy can do for Norma
Jean is build miniature log cabins with Popsicle sticks, and talk about one day building an actual cabin.
After Norma Jean suggests he try to find another occupation, because he cannot take any usual job: “I
can’t do something where I’d have to stand up all day,” he has no way to fulfill his husbandly duties
(Gwynn, 317).
Various literatures and movies suggest that Jay Gatsby, also, felt he had to prove himself before
he could ever marry Daisy Fay. Frederick J. Hoffman suggests in his book, The Great Gatsby: a Study,
that “Daisy’s dependency upon wealth for the security and ‘respectability’ it grants” was the main
reason that Gatsby was fixated upon wealth (Hoffman, 116). Jordan Baker recalls meeting Jay in 1917,
when he was a young lieutenant about to ship out (Fitzgerald, 76). This lieutenant did not have any
money or inheritance until he befriended Dan Cody. It seems that Jay’s focus on wealth was so that he
could successfully provide for Daisy Fay in the comfortable life style to which she was accustomed. Jay
tried to apologize for the five year delay by demonstrating the wealth he had accumulated solely for her.
Hoffman also suggests that “Gatsby’s relationship to money is pure and disinterested, unselfish; he
wants it only to use it as a means of transcending time, reinstating the past, but most of all redirecting
the ‘Platonic conception of himself’” (Hoffman, 117). The best way for Jay to pass time within that five
year period was to continuously increase his wealth, all for Daisy, so that when they could finally be
together, he could lavish her with riches unselfishly.
Both Leroy and Jay fixate on an object or a place that represents the past; for Jay it’s a green
light at the end of a dock. But Leroy begins to believe that the solution to his fragmented marriage is
hidden in Shiloh. Mabel and he both convince Norma Jean that Shiloh would make for a much needed
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vacation – with time alone for the two as a couple. At first it seems like an awkward first date: “He feels
awkward, like a boy on a date with an older girl. They are still just making conversation” (Gwynn, 324).
From the beginning, this couple transitions from hard times to harder times, and Norma Jean asserts her
independency by moving on by herself, while Leroy waits so he can move on with Norma Jean. Since he
has been waiting so long to grow and heal with his wife, she has to backtrack in order to do the same,
but she has grown so independent that she decides to finally leave him rather than be slowed down
(Gwynn, 324). Leroy’s fantasy of waiting for Norma Jean distracts him from healing his fractured
marriage. And Norma Jean’s final words at Shiloh bring him back to reality.
Jay’s fixation, unlike Leroy’s, is not a place, but rather a blinking green late at the end of a dock
across the bay. This light seems to be the driving force that keeps Jay believing that five years is nothing
and that Daisy is still waiting for him. In Richard Lehan’s book, The Great Gatsby: The Limits of Wonder,
Lehan suggests that Gatsby’s fixation on the past and mending the mistakes he had made, requires him
to change reality by altering the stories he tells others (Lehan, 60). In acquiring Daisy once and for all,
his imagination creates his own fantasy based upon the fact that Daisy never once loved Tom Buchanan
but was merely waiting for Jay during the entire five year lapse. Jay cannot handle it when Daisy breaks
things off and waits by the phone for the phone call he is sure he will receive from his lover. The only
thing that grounded Jay and brought him back from his vivid illusion, since Daisy let him be, was death.
By trying to force their women to be “borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald, 182),
both Leroy and Jay lost their women. Not only did they lose their women, but they lost themselves in
their fantasies until reality slapped them in their faces. They also lost themselves in trying to mend the
past, which also caused them to lose sight of the present and the hope for their prospective futures.
Reflection on the past can be helpful to strengthen relationships by granting experiences for one to
learn from. But living in the past caused both Leroy and Jay to destroy the relationships they had built.
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If only Leroy Moffit and Jay Gatsby had realized this sooner and worked for resolution, their stories
might have had happier endings.
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Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925. Print.
Hoffman, Frederick J. The Great Gatsby: A Study. New York: Scribner, 1962. Print.
Lehan, Richard. The Great Gatsby: The Limits of Wonder. Ed. Robert Lecker. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Print.
Mason, Bobbie Ann. “Shiloh”. Fiction: a Pocket Anthology. Ed. R.S. Gwynn. New York: Longman, 2012.
Print.