Like a series of party scenes that once bloomed bright in the 1920s east coast, The Great Gatsby is like a festivity in itself—one long-drawn summer of humid heat, boating, late-night parties, and forgotten love. Jay Gatsby emerges into being in the middle of his own beautiful mansion like a god, but much like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose own life passed its climax of brilliance and fizzled into debt, Gatsby’s life is quick in ascent and descent; and this life arc, in turn, is an echo of many others in the past.
On the shore of Long Island Sound, New York, are two egg-shaped headlands of Fitzgerald’s invention: West Egg, inhabited by Nick (the narrator) and Gatsby, and East Egg, where Daisy and her husband live along with the more “fashionable” people of the district. At night, from his garden, Gatsby watches a green light flicker in the distance: Daisy’s dock light, glimmering over the dark expanse of water between them. To Gatsby, this distance is a river that can be forded, nothing more. But this current is actually something more to Fitzgerald: it is the gulf of time that has opened between them, ceaseless and flowing, and he tells us that it cannot be closed.
“But if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…
… One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling…”
Images of Gatsby and Daisy’s first romance envelop us, a glimpse five years into the past, haunting in its quick blossoming and ending like the season. The gulf of money and social class widens a sea between them, and Daisy, in two years’ time, marries a richer man. Gatsby becomes a richer man, still searching for that thing he had lost.
In present New York, sensual summer evenings cool once more into lonelier autumn days, and though again Gatsby denies it, yellow leaves are falling in his garden and the queer desolateness that has been present even in the merriest scenes is now laid bare and stark for everyone to see. All around as New York sheds its summer glory, Gatsby alone remains trapped in what Fitzgerald intends for readers to understand as old dreams and illusions.
The novella ends with an image of a boat rocking on a current. It overlaps with the first image we have of Gatsby, extending his arms toward something shining beyond his reach. The narration then opens up into a greater image into history, where Nick says Dutch settlers must have gazed at the new land in the same way when they first reached America, imbuing it with all kinds of hopes and desires the way Gatsby did with Daisy. Fitzgerald’s critique of the American Dream is in this way manifest, and he has Nick, the narrator, deliver the final line: “and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The land or light of which we dream remains bright in our eyes, but unbeknownst to us, the movement of time carries us further and further away.
