Kyna McIntosh
AP Literature
1
Gatsby Final Essay
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a tale recounting the triumphs and
tragedies of one man’s life during the roaring twenties. During the brief window in which
the narrator, Nick Carraway, observes Jay Gatsby, we witness the rise, the climax, and
the fall of his American Dream. This dream, of course, includes all of the basics of the
typical white-picket-fence American Dream. These have come to be considered the basic
necessities of any “normal American family.” They are: wealth, a car and home, and a
wife. Gatsby, of course, had all of these things but one. In the end, it becomes clear that
Fitzgerald does not think particularly highly of the American Dream. He instead favors
what he refers to as “the greatest of all human dreams,” or a subject that can evoke a
wonder that can fulfill mankind’s “capacity for wonder.” Gatsby, his most redeemable
character, dies in pursuit of it, and Tom Buchanan, one who has actually obtained all of
the ideals of the American Dream, is living proof that it has no bearing in comparison to
the “greatest” dream. It becomes apparent in his final chapter that Fitzgerald’s idea of a
proper dream is that of an irretrievable wonder long past, having died when the first
explorers laid eyes on the beaches of the New World.
However, given this theory, Fitzgerald’s choice of a title comes off as confusing.
Why would a failure, namely Gatsby, be referred to as “great?” It would seem that
Fitzgerald has intentionally given Gatsby a trait or traits worthy of “greatness.” It can be
assumed that Gatsby’s greatness lay in his extreme perseverance. No matter what the
obstacle, be it a marriage or a lack-of-wealth, he stopped at nothing to obtain his goal.
However, it seems more likely that his greatness came as a result of his doggedness. If
Kyna McIntosh
AP Literature
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Fitzgerald’s ideal dream is the ultimate wonder of man, then Gatsby may well have
achieved it in his daydreams of Daisy. His life revolved around her, and Fitzgerald
mentions several times the “romantic mystery” that surrounds her. In some ways, she can
be considered the personification, or symbol of the original New World. When Gatsby
first met her, he experienced the same wonder as those first sailors who spotted the New
World on the horizon. Later, however, after dreaming of her and her wonder for so long,
he came back to discover that her once mysterious voice was now “full of money,” just
like Fitzgerald’s greatest of all dreams became the perversion that is the American
Dream, and also full of wealth and riches. Gatsby’s greatness stems from his original
dream of Daisy, which was equivalent to that of the “Dutch sailors.”
Fitzgerald also uses imagery to convey different moods in his novel. Specifically,
he uses colors to convey the two different dreams. At Gatsby’s parties, where the
attending dream was that of the American ( as conveyed by all of the shallow,
materialistic people present ), the primary color used was that of yellow, as used to
describe the “yellow bug” that brought party-goers to and fro, the “yellow cocktail
music” played, some guests dressed in “yellow dresses,” and a the “yellow light” that
pervaded the party. Yellow is the color of extreme energy, and reflects the blind, blunt
energy of the party, more animal and less human. Gatsby himself is represented as blue, a
calm and concentrated color. He is a pensive man, who is focused on his single goal, and
is not affected by his parties in the slightest. His gardens, before the invasion of the
parties, are “blue,” and his servants dress in “robin’s egg blue.” Gatsby’s dream of Daisy,
not Daisy herself, is portrayed as green. The green is also sued to describe the “fresh,
green breast of the new world” as described in Fitzgerald’s “greatest” dream. Therefore,
Kyna McIntosh
AP Literature
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it can be said that as Gatsby reaches for the green light as Daisy’s dock, as he “believed
in the green light,” he was reaching into the past for that long forgotten wonder of the
new world. Fitzgerald goes on to say that mankind as a whole is “borne back ceaselessly
into the past” in pursuit of this greatest of all dreams. Though we feel as though forward
is the direction to take, we are subconsciously returning to that greatest of dreams that
lies in the past.
In the final few paragraphs, Fitzgerald utilizes the vast English language to his
advantage, and puts emphasis on the unobtainable. He first paints a beautiful picture of
the “greatest” dream, talking of “flowering,” “fresh,” “green,” and “enchanted” longgone forests of the beach. This dream is the past, and we have been disillusioned to
believe that it lies in the “orgiastic future.” He then goes on to tack timeless words onto
this dream, bringing to light the knowledge that the dream can never be known. Words
like “obscurity,” “dark,” “night,” “recedes,” “ceaseless,” emphasize the perpetual
obscurity of this greatest of all dreams. But not even this can squash the perpetually
persistent human hope. He “believed in the green light,” that is, he believed in the dream
and chased it. The knowledge that it was unobtainable did little to stop him, just as it did
not stop Tom from pursuing vivacity, nor will it stop the rest of society from chasing it.
Because, by and by, we will “run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine
morning—”
The American Dream is therefore a perverse twist on the true “greatest of all
human dreams,” which Fitzgerald claims to be the something that will fulfill and perhaps
even exceed man’s “capacity to wonder.” Man has, in his haste to achieve the shallow
dream of wealth and prosperity that so pervades and indeed rules society today, somehow
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AP Literature
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twisted his original “green” dream into the exaggerated and out-of-proportion “yellow”
dream. Fitzgerald thinks that this “greatest” of dreams was almost experienced by those
first explorers, long before man began to expand across America. He feels that the
American Dream as we have made it is unobtainable, as we have tried to assign objects to
an ideal dream, and found out upon obtaining said objects, discover that the feeling, that
“great” feeling that mankind has strived to gain, cannot be achieved through the
materialism that has pervaded society. Tom Buchanan is his example of a man who has
all that he wants, and yet still seeks that wonder, that vivacity that man has been striving
for since his conception.