haj7’s Blog

p. 180 “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-morow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And on fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald decides to put this quote at the end of this book. I think this quiote is really powerful and significant because not only does it have to do with Gatsby’s life, but it can be held acountable for anyone in general. The green light wasn’t just the light at Daisy Bucchanan’s house, it was a symbol of dreams and desires. No matter what Gatsby did, that green light was always on the otherside of the bay. His dreams of being with Daisy and having the typical American family seemed to be impossible, and the only thing making him persue this dream was his love in the past.

 So about the  boats. Fitzgerald said, “So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaslessly into the past.” In this part of the quote, he compares all human beings as boats against the current. The currents seems to represent time and the obsticles of life, because as we all know, currents make it harder for a boat to go up stream. When Fitzgerald said “born back ceaslessly into the past” he is bringing up how our past can motivate us, as it did for Gatsby. So even though we are heading up the current of life, the challenges and unfinished buissness of the past drives us forward towards the future.

“I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a groutesque thing a rose is and how raw sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”

I thought this quote was interesting because it was Nick’s own insight of what Gatsby was thinking and feeling in his final moments of life. It’s pretty tragic when your entire life is pretty much based on one thing and when you realize you will never obtain what cannot be obtained, you see the world as a pretty ugly place. Gatsby reaching this realization was basically the climax of his life. This internal epiphany was the height of his life and then it just ended instantly. It’s really become a sad story. You just have a tale of a man who falls in love with a girl, then he goes to war, but then when he comes back she is married. Then to top that you have this whole ordeal with the car and the shooting to end it all. I think Gatsby is truely a tragic character who’s flaw is not being able to let go of love, which is a pretty nobile cause compared to Ahab’s desire to just kill an animal.

In this chapter, there is a deadly car inncident that ends up in the death of Myrle. Daisy was driving the car with Gatsby in it and Myrtle walked out into the road and they had just hit her and kept on going. The thing that really seemed to strike me was where Gatsby’s head was at. He didn’t really think about the fact that the love of his life just killed a person. He’s more or so concerned on how Daisy feels about the inncident. Gatsby was just standing outside at night in the moonlight, thinking to himself. One quote that really shows his concern with Daisy is on page 145.

“Is it all quiet.” I hesitated. “You’d better come home and get some sleep.” He shook his head. “I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport.” He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scruitiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight- watching over nothing.

This passage reminds me of the beggining of the book where we first see Gatsby just staring out across the harbor at the greenlight where Daisy lived. Now, he’s just standing around and staring into nothing. I think this might be Fitzgerald’s way of showing how Gatsby’s dreams are pretty much gone. He’s staring out at nothing which shows that he really isn’t persueing anything. When someone leads a life without dreams, they are living an empty life. I think that this whole car inncident has truely crushed his dreams of having a life with Daisy. Sooner or later the authorities will catch up and it will either be Gatsby or Daisy in jail (more or so Gatsby since he is taking the blame).

In this chapter we seem to find out more about Gatsby’s obsession with being with Daisy. On page 109, it says ”

 He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say:”I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house- just as if it were five years ago. “And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours-” He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.  “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

This passage really shows Gatsby’s obsession with persuing Daisy. It must be  really difficult to tell someone you have been married to for years that you never loved them and Gatsby doesn’t seem to realize this. Gatsby’s flaw seems to be that he is too caught up with something  in the past. When a person is too caught up with something that happened in the past, it can really mess with them. Nick tries to explain to Gatsby that he cannot repeat the past but Gatsby objects to him. Sometimes, things like this are just better left alone and behind us.

Putting this weight on Daisy’s shoulders isn’t really the right thing to do. You cannot simply ask a person to do such a thing such as telling your spouse that you don’t love them. Even though Tom is cheating on Daisy, it really seems that somewhere deep inside of him that he actually cares about her, such as the time he beat Myrtle for mentioning her name. Gatsby doesn’t really have that many practical options besides just telling Tom about how he is in love with Daisy. Gatsby might get beaten up by Tom, but it would be more noble to do this than to force Daisy to do it.

Gatsby’s obssesion for a perfect life with Daisy almost reminds me of the same kind of motivation of Ahab and Moby Dick. Both are propelled and driven by things that have happened in the past that they cannot let go of. However, Gatsby’s obsession is more a love obsession rather than Ahab’s obsession of hatred.

In this chapter, Gatsby and Daisy meet up with eachother for the first time in years. One of the quotes that really shows about Gatsby’s feelings and thoughts about daisy is on pg. 91. “He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything around his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.”

In this quote, we really get to see how Gatsby is towards being around Daisy. It really seems that he has strong feelings for her and it almost doesn’t seem real that she is actually there. I thought it was funny on how Nick mentioned how he nearly toppled down the stairs. You can really find out about a person on how they act when they are outside of their confort zone. Gatsby has been the host to hundreds and hundreds of people, yet when Daisy comes to his house and sees his belongings he’s just stumbling all over the place.

In this chapter, we get to meet Gatsby more when Nick and Gastby go to the city. Gatsby starts telling him about his past and how he got where he is today. On page 65, Fitzgerald says, “He looked at me sideways-and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole  statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.  “What part of the Middle West?” I inquired casually. “San Francisco.” “I see.”

To the reader, Gatsby seems a bit mysterious in his ways. Just fromt he way he talks, Nick starts to sense that Gatsby is lying. It seems really strange by referring San Francisco to be in the Middle West. Something is up with Gatsby but what is it? Could it be that he was ashamed of the way he aquired his money? Talks about conversations with Gatsby seem to have lead upon the numerous rumors. Part of me thinks that Gatsby might be somewhat hooked in with the mob. During the prohibition times, the mafia was really in charge of transporting and making alchohol. At Gatsby’s party(s), he had lots of alchohol yet he doesn’t seem to get busted for it. In meeting Gatsby again, the reader thinks to be able to learn more about him, yet we’re still asking more questions.

In the third chapter, Nick is at a party, but it’s not just any party. It’s a Gatsby party. There’s a lot of people, music, and alcolhol (and this is prohibition). Oddly enough, Gatsby really isn’t seen at his own party. Many people start to talk about him with rumors that he killed a man in cold blood or that during the war, he was actually a German spy. Nick starts to talk to a man who he reconized from the war. They start talking until Nick starts to bring up Gatsby in their  conversation. It turns out that the man who Nick was talking to is actually Gatsby. It seems quite a bit odd that Gatsby isn’t taking part in his own party that he threw. In this chapter, Gatsby seems to be more of an observer than one partakes in these festivites. Nick tells us about Gatsby when he says,

“He smiled understandingly- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It face- or seemed to face- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with irrestible predjudice in your faver. It understood you as you would like to belive in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished- and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thrity, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Sometime before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.”

From this passage we can tell so much about Gatsby’s personality just from the way he smiles and talks. Unlike the other characters, he seems to be a more down to earth and real person. We’ve met Tom who’s always trying to bring Nick wherever he goes, Daisy, Nick’s cousin who sits down and gossips all day, and here we have Gatsby, this really welcoming guy who seems to be an all around decent person. At this party, there are people just dancing around and getting drunk while this man just sits down and watches everyting, and he’s supposed to be the host. It seems that Gatsby prefers to spend his time alone (such as when he was staring at the water by himself in the first chapter). It will be interesting on how a character as down to earth and real as Gatsby will play out with the other characters in this book.

In this chapter we get to know more about Tom’s character and who he really is. Nick and Tom were just on a trip to the city to meet the woman who Tom is having an affair with. This seems to be a very strange thing to do with a person you’ve recently met. When someone is having an affair, they usually try to keep it a secret, but Tom brought Nick with him as if it were normal. Why would you have an outting with the cousin of the woman you are married with and the woman you are having an affair with? I wonder if Tom truely trusts Nick to keep this information away from Daisy or if he thinks that Nick doesn’t really care that much about it. It seems such a pitty that Daisy just sits home all day while Tom gets to go to the city with Myrtle.  Tom  might seem to be trying to show off in front of Nick, or trying to become friends with him and earn his trust by showing his own trust in Nick.  We also see some conflict within Tom when Mrs. Wilson starts to mention Daisy on page 37 when she said, “Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy Dai-” Making short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.” It seems that Tom is filled with guilt about his affair and that he would rather not think about his wife. To actually phisically strike his mistress is a horrible act to commit and it makes you think what kind of a person does that. It will be interesting on how this whole affair plays out in the rest of the book.

In this first chapter we meet the main character of the book, Nick, who went to Yale and is living in the West Egg. During the first chapter there is a dinner with some very uncanny conversation topics such as going into the word “hulking” and a character named Tom keeps on trying to get the other dinner guests to be interested in a book that he read that had racist white supremisist messages. This whole dinner conversation seemed to be a bit awkward. It kind of reminds me of situations that I have been in where there has just been a bunch of off topic and random conversations going on and people just trying to make anything worth talking about.

During this gathering, we hear about Gatsby, Nick’s neighbor. Nick sees him on his lawn. He seems like a somewhat mysterious character when Nick says “But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimidation that he was content to be alone- he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward- and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.” This was a very interesting passage that makes the reader really want to learn more about Gatsby. I wonder if Gatsby could have just been thinking by the sound. Many people find long island sound to be a relaxing sight to take some time and almost meditate over things. Him reaching his arms towards the dark water could have been symbolism of how man reaches out to nature in order to reflect upon their life in society. However, I think it’s way too early in the book to be drawing these kind of conclusions.