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| F. Scott Fitzgerald Nickolas Muray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Good evening.
Today, I invite you to journey with me back to the dazzling 1920s—a decade of jazz, champagne, and shimmering dreams—through the pages of one of America’s greatest novels: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It is more than a story of wealth and romance. It is a mirror held up to the soul of the American Dream—a dream glimmering with promise, yet often hollow within. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is, in its essence, a tragedy written in gold and dust.
I. The Setting and Atmosphere
Set in the summer of 1922, the novel unfolds on Long Island, in two fictional villages: East Egg and West Egg. These are not just places on a map but symbols—East Egg, home to the “old money” elite, whose wealth is inherited and mannered; West Egg, the new-rich, self-made, and ostentatious.
Our narrator, Nick Carraway, comes from the Midwest to New York to learn the bond business. He rents a modest house in West Egg, beside a mansion so magnificent that it seems almost mythical—the mansion of Jay Gatsby.
And who is Gatsby? That question itself is the novel’s heartbeat. For much of the story, he is a rumor, a legend wrapped in mystery. Nick tells us, “There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”
Gatsby, as we discover, is a man who has built himself—and his fortune—from nothing, all for the love of one woman: Daisy Buchanan.
II. The Characters and Their World
Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s cousin, lives in East Egg with her husband, Tom Buchanan—a man of wealth, arrogance, and brute strength. Tom is the embodiment of inherited privilege. He is careless, entitled, and cruel, “a sturdy, straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.”
Daisy, on the other hand, is beautiful and elusive—a woman whose voice, as Gatsby once says, “is full of money.” That single phrase captures both her charm and her corruption: her beauty draws you in, but her soul is tied to wealth, comfort, and social status.
In the city, Tom keeps a mistress—Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a mechanic, George Wilson, who owns a garage in the desolate “valley of ashes.” This valley, a wasteland between West Egg and New York, stands as a haunting symbol of moral decay beneath the glittering surface of the Jazz Age. Presiding over this wasteland are the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, a giant, faded billboard—“blue and gigantic—their retinas one yard high.” These eyes, unblinking, watch the moral failures of all who pass below.
III. The Plot: Dream and Disillusionment
Nick soon receives an invitation—a rare privilege—to one of Gatsby’s legendary parties. Picture it: music, laughter, champagne flowing like water, and guests who “came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” Yet, no one truly knows Gatsby; they only know his legend.
When Nick finally meets him, Gatsby turns out not to be the extravagant caricature people imagine but a man of quiet hope and intensity. And then we learn his secret: Gatsby is in love with Daisy Buchanan.
Five years earlier, before Gatsby went off to war, he had fallen in love with Daisy—a young girl from Louisville. But when he returned, she was married to Tom. Gatsby’s entire fortune, his mansion, his parties, his persona—all were built with one goal: to win her back.
As Nick tells us, Gatsby “wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say, ‘I never loved you.’” He wanted to erase the past—to reclaim an ideal moment that existed only in his memory.
Nick arranges a reunion between Gatsby and Daisy. Their meeting is tender, awkward, and full of unspoken yearning. For a time, they rekindle their romance. Gatsby, radiant with hope, believes that he can recreate the past. When Nick warns him, “You can’t repeat the past,” Gatsby replies with quiet defiance, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!”
It is the single most tragic line in the book, for it reveals the fatal flaw of Gatsby’s dream—his inability to see that the world, and Daisy herself, have moved on.
IV. The Climax: The Dream Collapses
As the summer burns on, tensions rise. One fateful afternoon, in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, Gatsby confronts Tom. He demands that Daisy admit she never loved her husband.
But Daisy cannot. She falters. She says she loves both of them—Tom and Gatsby. The dream begins to crumble.
That same evening, tragedy strikes. Driving back from the city, Daisy—behind the wheel of Gatsby’s car—accidentally kills Myrtle Wilson in a collision. Gatsby, ever devoted, takes the blame.
In the aftermath, Tom tells George Wilson that the car belonged to Gatsby. In his grief and rage, Wilson shoots Gatsby in his pool and then kills himself.
Nick finds Gatsby’s body floating in the water, alone and forgotten—the dreamer slain by the reality he refused to see.
As Nick reflects, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” The green light—shining at the end of Daisy’s dock across the bay—had symbolized Gatsby’s dream: his longing, his hope, and his belief in the promise of a better tomorrow.
But the light, as Nick realizes, is forever out of reach.
V. Themes and Symbolism
What makes The Great Gatsby so extraordinary is not only its plot but also its vision. It is, in many ways, the great American myth—a story of aspiration, illusion, and loss.
As Nick says, “They’re a rotten crowd... You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Gatsby, for all his flaws, is a man of faith—faith in possibility, in love, in the dream. And that makes his fall all the more tragic.
VI. The Language and Style
Fitzgerald’s prose is poetry. Each line shimmers with rhythm and imagery. Few novels have been written with such lyrical grace.
Consider Nick’s final reflection—one of the most beautiful passages in all of literature:
“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 — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
This is not merely a conclusion—it is a lament for the human condition. For we, too, are like Gatsby—reaching out for dreams just beyond our grasp, forever chasing our own green lights.
VII. Why The Great Gatsby Endures
Why does The Great Gatsby remain one of the most special novels ever written—a book that continues to move readers nearly a century later?
It endures because it speaks to something timeless in us all—the yearning for meaning, for love, for a dream that defines our lives. It tells us that dreams are beautiful but also fragile; that reality, no matter how harsh, will always pierce illusion.
Fitzgerald once wrote of his own generation that it was “a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” And yet, through Gatsby, he offers a fragile kind of hope—the hope of those who dream despite the odds.
In Gatsby’s tragedy, there is dignity. In his downfall, there is nobility. He may be defeated, but he remains uncorrupted in his belief—he continues to believe in love, in possibility, and in the green light.
As Nick observes, Gatsby turned out “all right in the end.” It was the world—the careless people like Tom and Daisy—that was corrupt. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
VIII. Conclusion: The Eternal Dream
Each of us has our own green light—our own dream glimmering across the bay. Each of us has known what it is to reach for something we may never grasp. And each of us has discovered that time, like the tide, moves us inexorably backward, even as we strive forward.
And yet, we continue. We hope. We dream.
Fitzgerald gives us this paradox—that the human spirit, though flawed, is unbreakable in its yearning. That is what makes The Great Gatsby not just a novel but a mirror—a poem of the heart, a dream eternal.
So let us remember Gatsby—not as a fool chasing illusions, but as a symbol of our collective longing, our courage to hope even when hope is lost.
Thank you.
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