Gatsby's Green Light

I can't think of a better close to a book better than F. Scott Fitzgerald's, "The Great Gatsby". The last few lines are pure genius and have haunted me for years. They bring me back to this book for another reading year after year and back to my mind on countless occasions. In a book of simple language though sometimes complex ideas, Fitzgerald absolutely nailed it in the closing paragraphs.

I first read Gatsby in high school at the hands of an overbearing English teacher who wanted me to take her interpretation as fact. Though I bowed to her interpretation for essays, I never let go of my reading of it.

I think of it through Nick's eyes. Surveying a quiet, desolate area that was once alive and contemplating to himself. Too bad there aren't more people making moving, meaningful movies right now. Gatsby would be a good one if you could capture the tragedy of it all. Here it is below:

"He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It alluded 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 imagery alone in that ending is staggering. Though the green light alludes us, we will run after it faster and try harder to capture it. This is what writing is all about. I can't help but think about the green light and what it stood for for Gatsby.

Interestingly enough I always knew that line as the "orgiastic" future. Apparently an editor changed the word after Fitzgerald's death and orgiastic got inserted where it should have been orgastic. There's a little piece on this found here, and more than you would ever want to know avaialable at another site.

more coming on the green light when I have time...