The Great Gatsby - Estimated Read Time = 3 1/2 hours
This Article - Estimated Read Time = 15 minutes
Time This Article Saves You = 3 hours and 15 minutes
*Most books need to be read twice before they can really be understood. This article saves you time & effort by helping you reach a solid understanding with just one read.
The Great Gatsby - Podcast Episode
Surprisingly, The Great Gatsby wasn’t a smash hit right out of the gates. In its 1925 release, it wasn’t met with astonishing reviews or surging sales. Not until the 1940s, years after Fitzgerald’s death, was the novel’s reputation chalked up to anything more than a negligible little novel, and a complete commercial failure.
Then, fate arose.
During WWII, sets of various paperback novels were given to troops abroad; randomly, The Great Gatsby was included within those sets.
That put the novel square in front of an entire generation. From that time forward, it exploded in commercial popularity and critical acclaim.
Today, it’s held as one the greatest American novels ever written.
It’s considered the defining work of the Jazz Age, offering the elite portrait of the Roaring Twenties. Plus, it contains some of the most beautiful language I’ve ever encountered.
And yet, when venturing into interpreting this grand work, that same beautiful language presents one of the most twisted, knotted tangles I’ve ever attempted to unravel.
I’m glad to say that after a 2nd read, and then a 3rd, and 4th, and 5th…I believe I’ve figured something—The Great Gatsby intends to spark an electrifying hope in the boundless possibilities of life, while simultaneously tempering that hope with a warning of the tragic hollowness some dreams deliver.
Story Recap . Spoiler Alert!
The novel opens with the voice of Nick Carraway, the narrator, who relays the entire story of a summer he spent working in New York, and living on Long Island in a small bungalow he’d rented, that sat beside an enormous mansion. The mansion belonged to one Mr. Jay Gatsby.
The first three chapters recount three summer nights whose connections are slowly drawn.
Chapter One - Nick introduces himself, recounts his ambitions that led him East, and then flows into the story of his initial visit to his cousin Daisy, and her husband Tom, who also live in Long Island, across the bay from him. Jordan Baker, who Nick shares a summer romance with, is also present.
Over the course of the evening, Jordan informs Nick that Tom has “a woman on the side.” This woman keeps calling Tom, and the shrill ringing of the telephone sustains a constant tension throughout the night.
Chapter Two - Tom takes Nick into New York City, picking up his “woman on the side,” Myrtle, along the way. A wild party ensues in Tom and Myrtle’s Manhattan apartment. The evening ends when Tom slaps Myrtle for saying Daisy’s name.
Chapter Three - Nick receives an invitation from his mysterious neighbor, Gatsby, to attend one of his magnificent parties. Nick bumps into Jordan Baker there, who Gatsby then pulls aside to reveal private information to.
Nick’s reflects on the connection he slowly drew between these three days, that set the stage for everything that followed after.
Chapter Four - One day, out of the blue, Gatbsy takes Nick into New York City, driving in his beautiful yellow car. Gatsby provides a backstory for himself, one which is mostly untrue. They meet Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatbsy’s business associate, at a speakeasy beneath a barbershop, in order for Wolfsheim to vouch for Gatsby’s character.
Then, Nick is brought to tea with Jordan Baker, who informs Nick of Gatsby’s undying love for Daisy, and Gatsby’s request that Nick invite Daisy to tea, so that Gatsby can be reunited with her.
Chapter Five - Nick invites Daisy to tea at his small bungalow. She arrives, and at first, the meeting between her and Gatsby is intensely awkward. Until Nick calls Gatsby out on being rude and acting like a boy. Then, Gatsby gets it together, reunites with Daisy, and provides a tour of his mansion to Nick and Daisy.
Chapter Six - Nick opens and closes this chapter by relaying some of Gatsby’s true past, and how his undying love for Daisy was born. Besides that, Daisy and Tom attend one of Gatsby’s parties. Somehow, the party doesn’t seem to go as Gatsby wishes.
Chapter Seven - Nick, Jordan, and Gatsby are all invited to Tom and Daisy’s for lunch, where, because of the intensity of the heat, they drink gin rickeys in “greedy swallows.” Daisy and Gatsby’s affair is revealed to Tom. Following the revelation, they go to New York City, in two separate cars.
In a room at the Plaza hotel, Gatsby and Tom have it out. Tom reveals the crooked sources of Gatsby’s wealth, and Daisy is unable to say she never loved Tom. Gatsby loses.
On Gatsby and Daisy’s drive back to Long Island, as they pass through the Valley of Ashes, Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, dashes at the speeding car. She’s struck and killed instantly, while Gatsby and Daisy’s car never stops. It’s later revealed that Daisy—not Gatsby—was driving.
Chapter Eight - Gatsby informs Nick of his true origins, the morning after Myrtle’s death. Gatsby still awaits Daisy’s call, which never comes. Myrtle’s bereaved husband, the mechanic, learns from Tom that Gatsby is real owner of the car, leading him to believe that Gatsby killed Myrtle. As the chapter closes, he shoots Gatsby dead, and then turns the gun on himself.
Chapter Nine - The final chapter. Nick recites his distress at Gatsby’s death, and how unnerved he was to find that no one else cared. None could be bothered to attend Gatsby’s funeral, not even Daisy.
Nick’s introspective dives mark the closing section, as he contemplates the difference between the East and West, and furthermore, reflects and comments upon Gatsby’s green light.
“Gatsby believed in the green light,” he states. But then his final words suggest that the more unabated our striving is for it, the further it recedes beyond our grasp. Because the green light is somehow unattainable, unreachable, an impossibility to truly take hold of.
Then, just like that, without a further word or clarification, the novel ends.
An Interpretation - The Grasping of a Dream
The Great Gatsby, more than anything else, is a reminder to dream. But it’s a reminder laced with a warning, concerning the catastrophe that can accompany the pursuit of an unattainable dream.
The Great Gatsby functions on two levels:
The Actual Plot, involving several characters and motivations.
The Symbolism the novel is rife with, nearly to the point of overflowing.
Let’s lay out the symbols first, and then walk through how the more significant symbols contribute to the plot, and create the novel’s overarching meaning.
The Eyes of Dr. T.J Eckleburg = God
West Egg = New Money
East Egg = Old Money
Daisy = Wealth
The Green Light = Gatsby’s Wealth-Marked Dream
Daisy = Wealth
Through the entire novel, Nick comments again and again on Daisy’s voice, that it contains some magical quality. After countless references like this, in chapter seven, he finally discloses the nature of that magical quality, from the mouth of Gatsby himself.
“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood it before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbal’s song of it…high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…
Meaning, Daisy symbolizes wealth. This plays into understanding her influence upon Gatsby.
In Nick’s account, some ambitious greatness, some infinite capacity to dream and hope, marked Gatsby from the beginning. But when he met Daisy, everything changed. Their first kiss, as he says in chapter six, changed everything.
He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.
The Great Gatsby is replete with phrases like that—never romp again like the mind of God—that at first glance, are remarkably difficult to understand, to distinguish whether it’s a profound revelation with one clear meaning, or if it’s just pretty language whose actual substance is vague and muddy.
In this instance, I think it does mean something.
God—at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective, which largely marked the society Fitzgerald wrote within—is credited with creating all things. In the same vein, Gatsby was a creator. His finest invention was himself, his transformation from James Gatz, the son of poor, shiftless farmers from North Dakota, to the mysterious Jay Gatsby himself.
But when he kissed Daisy, his desire for greatness was waylaid, as his capacity for hope became eternally anchored to one, singular person. Gatsby himself comments on this, in relating his story to Nick.
I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her… Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her of what I was going to do?
However, circumstances ensured that they could not be together. She was “old money,” and he was not.
The trajectory of his life from that first kiss forward spells out her influence upon him.
He was shipped off to fight in WWI, where he won real honor, as a legitimate war hero. Then by chance, a free education at Oxford fell into his lap. By all accounts, he was well on his way to the great life that he yearned for from youth.
But then Daisy’s letter informs him of her engagement and soon coming marriage to Tom Buchanan, and that she has ceased to wait for him. In emotional agony, he deserts Oxford, returns stateside penniless, and vows to do whatever is necessary to win Daisy back.
Enter Meyer Wolfsheim.
Gatsby’s need for Daisy creates his need for wealth. That insatiable need creates a weakness in him, that he’s willing to sell himself, to enter organized crime, in order to amass the wealth and create the facade he believes he needs to win Daisy back.
This dream, of becoming who he needs to be, and of winning Daisy back, is all represented by the Green Light.
The Green Light = Gatsby’s Wealth-Marked Dream
At first, it’s difficult to distinguish what Nick truly thinks of the Green Light. He believes Gatsby is great, and Gatsby believes in the Green Light. But the novel is also an account of Gatsby’s downfall. So, what of it?
Apparently, papers upon papers have been written arguing what the Green Light means. Some take it as a symbol of Gatsby’s hopes and dreams, especially his love for Daisy. Some hold it to be Daisy’s undying love for Gatsby.
Personally, I understand it to be Gatsby’s dream of a life with Daisy, that’s grounded in his conviction that he needs wealth to have her. It represents what happened to his hopes and dreams upon his first kiss with Daisy. He imagined an entire life that was completely centered on her, and threw himself into its pursuit.
Nick alludes to this when he introduces Gatsby in the novel’s opening pages.
This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
As Gatsby’s origins unfold, a distinction is drawn between his “extraordinary gift for hope” and his attachment to the green light. When his capacity met Daisy, it gave birth to the Green Light—that which preyed upon him.
In chapter five, once he and Daisy are finally reunited, Nick comments on the lost significance of the Green Light, and then goes on to observe how the realization of Gatsby’s fantasy must’ve fallen short of his expectations.
As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.
At the the end passage, Daisy whispers something to Gatsby, and the enchantment is anchored once more. Because her voice was her one feature that “couldn’t be over-dreamed.”
Gatsby grasped hold of his dream, the Green Light itself, and found it lacking. But her voice, that charming allure of wealth, whispered to him promises of more.
I think this explains Gatsby’s somewhat strange demand later on that Daisy tell Tom she never loved him. He’s trying to relive the past, to wash away the past five years. But also, he believes that if his claim on her was only greater, and more exclusive, then he would no longer feel empty.
This symbolic thread may even extend to accident on the road, on the return from New York City. Gatsby’s dream demanded so much of him, that it became that which drove his life. Unfortunately, it made a wreck of it.
Therefore, to split the hairs of Fitzgerald’s symbolism—the Green Light is not good, as Gatsby’s particular wealth-marked dream, although his capacity for dreaming is. But Gatsby is far from the only one to believe that the answer to the hollowness inside is greater wealth. Which is why Nick closes the narrative with one final comment upon the Green Light itself.
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.
The Green Light is a warning concerning the catastrophes that can occur in the pursuit of an unattainable dream. However, the Green Light is not the whole of what the narrative offers.
The title itself bestows upon Gatsby a kind of “greatness.” If his wealth, his illusory infatuation with Daisy, and his belief in the Green Light—if these were not what made him great, but rather what preyed upon him, then the question is what did his greatness consist of?
Carraway tells us at the very beginning—his extraordinary capacity for hope; his romantic readiness; his infinite ability to dream great things, and live in the pursuit of those dreams. It was only when these capacities were married to a vision of life with Daisy that they became poisonous. But alone, prior to this, they are what rendered him great, at least in the eyes of Nick Carraway.
In that regard, The Great Gatsby, more than anything else, is a reminder to dream, and to live fully in light of the boundless capacities of this life.
Closing Thoughts
Warnings about the desire for wealth are always worth heeding. Because wealth is both wildly alluring in its promises, and extraordinarily dangerous to fall in love with.
However, my curiosity lies more in what The Great Gatsby offers positively, rather than in warning.
As a reminder to dream, the novel encourages the imagination, urging you to dream about the kind of life you could create. Which isn’t a harmful message, but I have found that it can go too far.
It can give life to an unhealthy discontent, that produces this restless agitation inside that’s never satisfied, and that rails against a simple contentedness.
Maybe that’s just me.
But I’ve found there’s a tension to be managed between dreaming big and pursuing faithfulness in your current circumstances. Perhaps the call of the novel varies, depending on who the listener is.
To those running faster, stretching further to finally grasp that green luminescence, the call is to stop. And to realize that the pursuit of your dream is ruining you.
To others, those indifferent to dreams, whose capacity for hope withered long ago, perhaps the call is to dream once more.
I find myself often wavering between the two. Perhaps that's why the novel has never landed flat or felt hollow to me, because it’s always offered some re-alignment to the course I’d fallen into.
If so, then perhaps there does exist some middle way, that through every leap and falter, splits between ambition and contentment, and that when followed, rises eventually like some dull and glittering path, and lifts, climbing and bounding its way recklessly, to where, amid the celestial glow, it burns—meek, calm, and at wonder—forever.