THE GREAT GATSBY
CH. 9 Lecture Notes
 In this chapter: Gatsby’s death to Nick departure.
 Fitzgerald ties up loose ends
 No one attends the funeral; no one visits the house other that
policemen, reporters
 Gatsby’s father contacts Nick 3 days after the death of his son:
like Jesus who was scorned by the other it’s only the father
who cares at the end? Coincidence?
 It is appalling how his so-called friends have disappeared and
abandoned Gatsby
Question:
Do we feel that these people truly are morally and spiritually
bankrupt? Or should we feel that in his pursuit for his false
dream he brought this on himself?
 His father proves to have loved his son all along and that he is
unaware of the dark side. He brings along a book “Hopalong
Cassidy” that Gatsby owned as a child. Inside he finds a
schedule (pp.164) even as a boy he believed in the dream.
He proves to us that he must have believed that if you worked
hard and kept to one plan one could accomplish anything they
set their mind to.
Metaphor
 Driving is a metaphor for life: careless drivers stand for those
who hurt other people= Jordan
 Nick sees Tom and realizes that the only way to deal with
people like him to turn the other way
“They were careless people Tom and Daisy- they smashed up
things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or
their cast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together
and let other people clean up the mess they had made”
pp.170
Final thoughts
- the story of this small group of people becomes the
portrait of a nation.
- His final night in West Egg he goes to Gatsby’s
abandoned home and then walks down to the beach.
He thinks of the past of how men may have perceived
America: it was a new world pure and unspoiled.
“…a fresh green breast of the new world” (171)
 Men have always been dreamers but we cannot
simply dream; we affix our dreams to someone or
something
 America was the land of infinite possibilities and it
was worthy of the dream: men saw it as the land for
equality and self-fulfillment
 What Gatsby never understood was that the dream
was behind him (171). Daisy simply wasn’t worthy
of his devotion
 Fitzgerald is trying to say that the America of the
20’s lost its way. People were shallow and
materialistic and the dream turned into something
cheap.
 The dream is what keeps us going and we struggle
like Gatsby to attain it.
 “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne
back ceaselessly into the past” (172) we valiantly
fight against the current of time and believe that the
past could be repeated
 therefore the book is about the promise and the
betrayal of that promise: Gatsby tragedy is that he
still believes in the dream and isn’t wise enough to
see where things went wrong.
Nick seems to suggest that America in the 1920’s has lost its waydeliberately or inevitably. America has become a shallow,
materialistic nation and the dream for which people fought and
about which poets wrote has turned into a cheap and vulgar
substitute for the real thing.
Fitzgerald seems to be saying that what keeps Americans going
as individuals is the belief in that dream and so they struggle like
Gatsby to attain it. But they are like “boats going against the
current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Americans row and
row against the current of time, trying to get back to the dream,
bearing themselves backward like Gatsby, who believed the past
could be repeated, but doomed by the hand of time to failure.
Whether Fitzgerald believes Americans can recapture that dream,
or whether it’s part of their lost childhood- both as individuals and
as a nation – is something the reader must decide. The Great
Gatsby is not, then, a novel about the 1920’s. It is about a
America- its promise and the betrayal of it. Throughout Fitzgerald
has contrasted Gatsby the dreamer with “the foul dust” that preyed
on his dream. The tragedy of Gatsby is that he still dreams the
dream, but that he is not wise enough or strong enough to see that
Daisy is not worthy of his devotion. He cannot step back to see
where he has gone wrong. Nick can. Nick loves Gatsby, but he
knows what is wrong with Gatsby’s dream.