As Nick tells Gatsby, “You can’t repeat the past,” Gatsby replies, “Why of course you can!” Chapter one ends with Nick spotting Gatsby’s arm stretching towards the darkness as he looks at the green light on Daisy’s dock. The greenlight symbolizes Gatsby’s dream, which he has worked very hard for his whole life. It is just like the sun, because everything he did revolved around it to give him the chance to move towards it. Gatsby reached for it everyday and became closer and closer it, in his mind, but in reality, he passed it up long ago.
Gatsby grew up in a family of poverty and eventually changed his name so he could restart his life, live adventurously, and pursue dreams. As this doesn’t go to plan, he becomes a soldier in WWI, where he tried “very hard to die.” He was in love with a girl he could not have because he did not come from a wealthy enough family.
Gatsby knew Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and was deeply in love with her. Having an extravagant lifestyle and throwing wild parties were all simply an attempt to win Daisy back. As he becomes a newly wealthy businessman in New York and finally becomes known to a high society, he moves into a mansion where people use him for his parties and nice luxuries. The parties are compared to a carnival and consists of “The Gatsby-Circus Ride,” where uninvited guests check out his Rolls-Royce, swimming pool, beach, rates of fresh oranges and lemons, buffet tents in the gardens overflowing with a feast, and an entire live orchestra playing under the stars.
Nick discovered many of the party guests do not even know who Gatsby is and that he keeps himself separated from the party, standing alone on the steps and watching his guests in silence. Gatsby, however, is OK with his guests using him, because they know his name at least and that he is wealthy. He feels special because in his life of poverty, he was a nobody, but becoming wealthy made him a somebody. However, it wasn’t a real somebody to everyone else, and was all an allusion in Gatsby’s mind.
What is total irony at the end of the story is that everyone came to use Gatsby for his parties and his materialism, but no one came to his funeral. The frivolous, shallow lives of the rich show the lack of goodness left in humanity. The book ends with Nick going over to Gatsby’s mansion, walking on to the shore where Gatsby once stood stretching his arms toward the green light. Nick links society to the boats eternally moving up the river, going forward but continually feeling the pull of the past. The more and more Gatsby reached for his dream, the more it retreated into the past, taking him further away from what is real.
